
Class _J::t: 5.3_g_ 

Book 'E± 

Gopght^'"_ 

COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Unto 
Hei^Kts Heroic 

(A. Biblical Interpretation) 



By 

Gardner S. Eldrid^e 




Ne-w "YorKt Eaton CEL Mains 
Cincinnati t Jennings Wu Fye 



^ 






THE LIBRARY OF 

SON GR ESS, 
Two Copies Received 

NOV. 4 1901 

COPYWQHT ENTRY 

CLASS Ox XXc. No. 

COPY a 



Copyright by 

EATON & MAINS. 

1902. 



TO THE MEMORY OF MY 
MOTHER 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 9 

Literature : 

The Book of Books 23 

The Book of the Meeting 39 

The Book of Life 57 

History : 

The Crossed Hands 71 

The Heart of the Vision 85 

The Kiss of Destiny 99 

Life: 

The Voices 1 11 

The Mission 123 

The Hero 137 

The Christ : 

Literature 153 

History 165 

Life 177 



INTRODUCTION 



"Amid all the mysteries by which we are surrounded 
nothing is more certain than that we are ever in the 
presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which 
all things proceed." — H, Spencer, 

'*As a matter of history, the existence of a quasi- 
human God has always been a postulate." — John Fiske, 

"He seems to hear a heavenly Friend 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labor working to an end." — Tennyson. 



INTRODUCTION 



Having once admitted the principles of the 
Reformation, it is inevitable that the Bible 
should become a storm center of controversy. 
For individualism is in its essence antagonistic 
to uniformity. It is impossible to inclose any 
number of thinking men within the circle of one 
idea, unless they abandon their thinking. 

*Tor every fiery prophet in old times, 

And all the sacred madness of the bard, 

When God made music through them, could but speak 

His music by the framework and the chord." 

Allowance must always be made for "the 
framework and the chord." 

But this very difficulty of identical thought 
and expression is a prime factor in human 
progress. For the value of controversy is not 
simply the victory of one party over the other. 
The main value is in the controversy itself; 
through it the vision is enlarged. 

The psalmist prayed, ''Open thou mine eyes, 
9 



IXTRODUCTIOX 

that I may behold wondrous things out of thy 
law.'' This prayer is being answered through 
the conflict of biblical study. The eyes of man 
are opening \vider and wider upon the book of 
God. From being a mere storehouse of proof 
texts open only to the theologian for dogma 
building, it is rapidly becoming the book of 
God open to the heart of man for life building. 

I know many people think the book in jeop- 
ardy — that the foundations of our faith are 
being undermined. Then possibly we need to 
lay the foundations deeper. \\'e ought neither 
to suspect the Bible of insecurity in itself, nor 
the critics of rendering it so, unless we first 
make sure that our faith is resting upon the 
real foundations of the book. 

It is one of the principles of life that we 
be constantly making our way through the 
transient toward the permanent; through the 
relative toward the absolute: through the 
guesses of man toward the truth of God. The 
same principle holds in the study of the Bible. 
A revelation in its essence is not what we find. 
but what comes to us: what is constantly and 
increasingly coming: what is revealed., and 
forever being revealed. The revelation, then, 
is always larger than our grasp of it. 

10 



Introduction 

Now, as a matter of fact the revelation of 
God to this world — that is, the revealing of 
God's life to the world through the Bible — is 
not and cannot be disturbed. Only grant the 
existence of God, a being from whom all things 
proceed, a being who is forever expressing him- 
self through the whole universe, and this won- 
derful book will easily take its place as the 
noblest expression he has ever made of himself. 

The controversy, as a rule, does not deal with 
revelation in this larger sense, but has to do 
with the material through which it comes. It 
is engaged in analyzing, in adjusting and read- 
justing, that material. It deals with the form 
rather than the spirit. 

Forms are transient, spirit permanent. We 
are making our way through the one toward 
the other. The constant passing of forms is 
the pathos of progress. Why, then, be so hasty 
in charging the critics with having stolen away 
our Master because the familiar form has dis- 
appeared? Lingering at the empty tomb with 
John a larger truth may dawn, and still linger- 
ing with the loving Mary the Master himself 
may speak. 

But all this urging in upon the heart of the 
book is the urgency of life itself. We cannot 

II 



Introduction 

rest in our Scripture searching, for somehow 
we are impelled by the conviction that life lies 
in here. As Jesus said of the Jews, ''Ye search 
the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have 
eternal life/' 

It is but the struggle for life, eternal life, old 
as our humanity. It is the spirit of man striv- 
ing into the presence of God : 'Tor this is life 
eternal, that they might know thee the only true 
God." There may be much vague groping, 
and many a wild plunge on the part of our 
thinking. It may be a strange Faust-like 
career, yet the urging thirst, the articulate 
cry, is that of the Pilgrim, "Life, life, eternal 
life!" 

Every time we have come more closely into 
the presence of God there has been a breaking 
up of many time-honored traditions. It was 
true of the Reformation in reference to the 
Church. Men cried out against the seeming 
vandalism. And when the Church emerged it 
was stripped of many forms that had been 
sacredly cherished. Yet it was more than ever 
a living Church. We had not lost, but gained. 
All was in the interest of the individual ap- 
proach to God; of a deeper experience; of a 
stronger spiritual life, a better and mightier 

12 



Introduction 

Church. It is the ever-recurring struggle of 
God and man to come into more spiritual re- 
lations. It is the passion of communion — of 
that fellowship which is life itself. 

But the question may be honestly raised as 
to whether the Bible is really taking on the 
more vital forms — whether it be coming into 
shape for the deeper spiritual nourishment of 
the soul and the larger influencing of the 
world; whether the eager spirit of man is 
really turning biblical interpretation into 
the more available, palatable, and spiritual 
food of life. 

The chief complaint is that the book is 
being humanized, that the supernatural is being 
driven into the background. Well, there is in 
this universe nothing more supernatural than 
God, and next to him nothing more supernat- 
ural than man. Carlyle has made this clear 
enough. Now, in the age-long struggle of the 
imperfect personality of man to rise into the 
perfect personality of God through intercourse 
and communion, who shall say that in the pres- 
ence of these personal forces there shall not be 
experiences and events that shall transcend the 
natural order? 

But in common with all other phenomena 
13 



Introduction 

these experiences and events are a legitimate 
subject for critical study. Suppose, then, that 
some things we once thought supernatural are 
now shown in the larger vision to be natural, 
is God any the less the author ? Does it prove 
that God is no longer the author of an event 
simply because we have an inkling of how it 
came to pass ? There is a natural supernatural- 
ism in which 'Sve live, move, and have our 
being." The more we cherish it the nobler 
must life become, God in our life becoming the 
rule, and not the exception. 

Or suppose the scientific investigator, with 
the mania of explaining things upon him, carry 
the process too far, as he certainly does some- 
times. Suppose he leave no room for an un- 
known quantity, how long can he maintain such 
a position? He can no more analyze and ex- 
plain the life of Moses without the presence of 
an Infinite and Eternal Person from whom 
that life proceeds than Herbert Spencer can 
analyze and explain the universe without the 
presence of his 'Infinite and Eternal Energy 
from which all things proceed." 

But if the book is becoming more human is 
it therefore becoming less divine? There is 
nothing in the world so much like God as our 

14 



Introduction 

humanity. This the Bible itself teaches. There- 
fore, the more human the book the more per- 
fectly will it reveal God. 

Now, what is really taking place in the pres- 
ent-day interpretation of the Bible ? If we take 
up the books that are rapidly coming to hand, 
the books that are to help us into the deeper 
meaning of God's life in the Bible, what do we 
find ? Such books as these : The Life and Liter- 
ature of the Hebrew People, History and Gov- 
ernment, Ethics and Religion, The Social Life, 
The Epic of the Inner Life, Literature of the 
Old Testament, The Messages of the Prophets, 
Literary Study of the Bible. 

These are the commentaries of to-day. And 
what is their significance? Just this, that in 
place of, or in addition to, the former textual 
interpretation in the light of our theology, we 
have historical, ethical, social, religious, poetic, 
and literary interpretation, in the light of the 
whole dramatic sweep of human existence. 
And this is equivalent to saying that it is in the 
light of that Spirit of God who is the Master 
of the world's progress. 

Is not this a gain ? Is it not getting beyond 
the cramped letter into the presence of the 
thing itself? Is not this passing between the 

15 



Introduction 

lines into the very atmosphere of that divine- 
human communion of which the Bible is a 
faithful record? Is not this getting hold of 
that communion at its vital centers, at those 
points at which its principles must radiate into 
the multitudinous interests of man ? Suppose, 
instead of an oracle from the lips of David 
that gives us a world of trouble, we pass be- 
yond the letter into the relation that exists 
between God and the man, how much broader, 
deeper, surer a standpoint from which to inter- 
pret the truth at issue. 

In our interpretations, then, we are coming 
into the universal language of the soul, that 
utters itself in relations rather than words. 
And so we are gaining, in the place of a dead, 
a living language. Books once sealed to us are 
being unlocked and their present-day value 
realized. 

The time has come indeed for passing on 
from the questions of ''higher criticism'' into a 
realm yet higher, that may be characterized as 
^'higher appreciation'' — the legitimate sequence 
of all criticism. We wait the genius to-day. 
We wait the creative masters — the man who 
can make the lofty figures, the mighty events, 
live again with a glory born of the increasing 

i6 



Introduction 

light, and the genius of the man, such as no 
former interpretation has achieved. 

But the ''higher appreciation" of what, of 
whom ? Why, of God ! Is not this the whole 
meaning of life, to appreciate God ? Is not this 
worship, praise, and service? — to appreciate 
God, to enter more and more into the signifi- 
cance of his life, deeper and deeper into its 
meaning. 

And this must come through a revelation; 
through those things wherein he expresses him- 
self; through the testimony of ''that which ap- 
pears/' We are thankful to Herbert Spencer 
that he finds in nature a testimony to the "In- 
finite and Eternal Energy." For energy has 
its place in the life of man. We are still more 
thankful to John Fiske that he finds in history 
a testimony to a "Quasi-Human God." For 
we have a yet deeper need for such a God. 

But we await a better testimony. All nature 
and all history taken together does not consti- 
tute a Bible. We need a revelation that will 
bring God into life in some creative way. For 
the infinite need of man is not simply life, but a 
"new life;" not something built or evolved from 
the past, but from the future. For we are made 
for progress ; and not only for progress, but we 
(2) 17 



Introduction 

have laid upon us the strange heroic task of 
passing from one world into another — not at 
death, but now and here: from a world of 
necessity into a world of freedom; from a nat- 
ural world into a world of grace — grace of God 
and grace of man; from a world of things and 
laws into a world of personalities and relations. 
There is not only a ''struggle for life'' and a 
''struggle for the life of others/' but there is a 
"struggle for the new life," and a "struggle for 
the new life of others." All the meaning of 
human progress is involved in the last two 
struggles. Man has laid upon him the super- 
human task of making himself, of finding the 
larger, diviner meaning of the soul through 
some "Divine Hero" of our moral and spiritual 
nature. And such a Hero the Bible reveals. In 
the prophecy of Isaiah the name "Hero-God" is 
employed. But more important than the name 
is the fact itself throughout the Bible. 

Everywhere throughout this divine-human 
drama God appears as the Hero-God. Every- 
where men and events, history, literature, and 
life, rise into heroic proportions only in his 
presence. What a book, then, for life ! — for the 
life of to-day, when the crying need of the hour 
is the strong, heroic life; when we are in such 

i8 



Introduction 

danger of becoming victims of facility and lux- 
ury; when the heroic task is laid upon us of 
mastering the old world, that has grown into 
infinite proportions through the same Hero- 
God who has proven himself master of Litera- 
ture, History, and Life throughout the age-long 
witnessing of the Bible. 

The attempt, then, that follows in these pages 
is to sketch in a brief, and I fear crude, manner 
the biblical philosophy of Literature, History, 
and Life — how all are evolved through the 
Hero-God; how through this literature he 
leads toward the higher vent of life; how life it- 
self is evolved through the meeting of the Hero, 
and redeemed through the companionship of 
his revelation; how history finds its progressive 
principle in him; how the world moves forward 
through the personal unfoldment of man 
through the personal Hero; and how, in its last 
analysis, the whole destiny of man hinges upon 
the individual relation of man to the Hero. 
Thus coming to the individual life, how that 
life makes its way through the voices to an ex- 
perience with the personal Hero, finds its mis- 
sion in his presence, and finally achieves it 
through the dynamics of God — the divine 
Hero in his redeeming passion; and how Jesus 

19 



Introduction 

of Nazareth proved himself, and unto this day 
is proving himself, master of Literature, His- 
tory, and Life. 

If this outline be true we have another 
glimpse into the noble vitality of the Bible; into 
its far-reaching purpose and power; into its 
unique and unrivaled place in the life of man. 
Yes, another glimpse into that great fact, that 
this ancient book has alone kept pace with the 
progress of man; has never been thrown ofif 
the scent; that it has ever held, and still holds, 
the secret of human development. 

I am conscious of having touched with un- 
skilled hands themes that far transcend my 
powers. 

*'For more's felt than is perceived, 
And more's perceived than can be interpreted, 
And Love strikes higher with his lambent flame 
Than Art can pile the fagots." 

20 



LITERATURE 
THe BooK of BooKs 



*'No skeptic he who bold essays 
T' unravel all the mystic maze 
Of the Creator's mighty plan — 
A task beyond the powers of man, 
Who, when his reason fails to soar 
High as his will, believes no more — 
No ! — calmly through the world he steals, 
Nor seeks to trace what God conceals, 
Content with what that God reveals." 

— Tennyson. 

''1 press God's lamp 
Close to my breast — its splendor, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom." — Browning. 



THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

" The words of the wise are as goads, and as rails fastened by the mas- 
ters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by 
these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end." — 
Eccles. xii, ii, 12. 

The author of Ecclesiastes discusses the 
problem of Hfe, and closes the discussion by 
warning us against the attempt to solve .the 
problem by a book. ''Of making many books 
there is no end." The last book can never be 
written, the last word never uttered. 

It is said that Victor Hugo used to walk by 
the seashore and throw off poetry from his 
rugged soul in response to old Ocean's mysteri- 
ous call. Man is ever walking by the shore of 
an infinite sea, from whose depths voices are 
calling, and the response is book on book. ''Of 
making many books there is no end." Of 
course all books are not the product of infinite 
mystery, but all great books are. They seem 
like a fruitless labor, a vain attempt to do the 
impossible. But in reality they have a divine 
mission, and our author presents that mission 
in a most striking and picturesque form. "The 
words of the wise are as goads," with which 
you spur the flock forward. And "they are like 

23 



Unto Heights Heroic 

nails" — or spikes — with which you pitch your 
tent from night to night. Both are given by the 
same shepherd. 

We have here a picture of life's progress — a 
flock spurred on by goads, while each day's ad- 
vance is held by driving stakes and pitching 
tents. It is a picture of the two great princi- 
ples of life, the progressive goad and the con- 
servative stake, the goad of progress, the spirit 
of adventure, the promise of life. 

^'By a mighty impulse driven, 
By a voice of mystic strength, 

'Go/ it cries; 'to thee is given 
Happiness to find at length.' " 

Then there is the conservative stake, the 
stake driven by our fathers. Around it cluster 
holy associations, dreams of the night, toils of 
the day, visions of God. It is sometimes very 
hard to strike those sacred tents. 

Some books are ''goads,'' and some are 
''stakes;" great books are both goads and 
stakes, given by the same shepherd. They 
revere the past while making for the future. 
"They come not to destroy, but to fulfill.'' 

The book of Ecclesiastes has served diverse 
ends. One man, missing entirely its literary 
genius, culls from it a lot of sparkling texts and 

24 



The Book of Books 

out of them builds strange systems of the- 
ology. Another one, equally blind to its liter- 
ary form, characterizes it as the pessimistic 
wailings of a disappointed voluptuary. As well 
treat Tennyson's ^Tn Memoriam" in a similar 
fashion by making it the basis of theology, or 
casting it aside as the wailings of disappoint- 
ment. Indeed, we shall best grasp the signifi- 
cance of Ecclesiastes, perhaps, in the light of 
this modern poem. 

In the English poem wx have a great sorrow- 
riven soul, keenly sensitive to the thought of 
his age, its problems and perplexities, its ques- 
tions, its misgivings, its hopes and fears. 
At times it sinks almost to the minor key of 
faith, then rises grandly to the major, and 
finally emerges in sight of the ^'far-ofif divine 
event." In the Hebrew poem we have also a 
great soul, equally sensitive to the thought of 
his age, to all its puzzling questions, its fasci- 
nating theories of life, its allurements and am- 
bitions, its aims and philosophies. At times he 
is almost engulfed by them, but finally emerges 
in sight of the whole ^'duty of man'' — the 
supreme goal. 

The book sparkles with philosophy, poetry, 
and maxims, but its great value is not in these. 

2S 



Unto Heights Heroic 

It is in its unseen goal, its ideal. And its power 
is in its movement, its trend toward that goal. 
This is the great value of books — not what they 
say, but what they suggest, where they lead. 
A book is a fragment struggling for completion. 
And that '^struggle" coupled with the character 
of the goal is its pith and power. 

Our author seeks life in the world. That 
world appears to him in three forms : pleasure, 
wisdom, and affairs — to feel, to know, to pos- 
sess. He rings the changes on these three forms 
of life. He seeks life as a votary of pleasure. 
He plucks the nearest, then the next, and the 
next as an ox crops grass across a field with no 
thought of what he is or where he is going. 
The venture is a failure — ''all is vanity.'' 

Then he seeks life as a votary of knowledge. 
He adds fact to fact according to certain mod- 
ern methods. But when he sums up his facts 
he gets no kind of livable world. The result is 
chaos, not cosmos. Something more than mere 
addition enters into the making of a world for 
man to live in. 

Finally he seeks life as a votary of affairs, 
and adds thing to thing, house to house. He is 
a man with a hoe, a very large hoe — the other 
man with a hoe whose brow grows not 

26 



The Book of Books 

more '^slanting/' but whose heart grows more 
pinched and bedwarfed. And again this Hfe- 
seeker's refrain is, ''Vanity of vanities.'' 

Now suppose the quest end here. Suppose 
this complete the book. The result is not Hfe 
but vanity, simply because an attempt has been 
made to crowd the whole into a part; all of life 
into one phase; man into an idea; the boundless 
into boundaries. Houses have been built with 
great pains and toil and care, one of pleasure, 
another of business, and another of knowledge, 
and, behold, not one of them is big enough to 
hold the man who built it. ''Surely this is 
vanity." This is the folly of the purely realistic 
book, the book that attempts to give us life by 
marking its boundaries. 

Life, they say, is made of facts, things, feel- 
ings, etc. Now let the artistic spirit move upon 
them, and, behold, we have a book; yes, a book 
disclosing the artistic glory of its maker, but 
in it no room for the maker himself. His own 
soul, unless dead, will beat against its bound- 
aries; will see the day when its very artistic 
beauty will pall upon the heart that is crying 
out for life. It simply does not give the higher 
vent to life. This is its folly. For real life is 

just this, that it is forever and forever seeking 

27 



Unto Heights Heroic 

the higher vent, the open road of God, the hill 
country of the soul. And all the facts and feel- 
ings and things must marshal around and lend 
themselves to this sublime journey. Indeed, 
their very life, their power, their glory is born 
of the soul's touch upon them as she passes on 
her way. 

Did you never feel the stifling narrowness 
of the realistic book ? All lines are boundaries, 
things are things, words are words and ''noth- 
ing more;" no windows, no glimpses beyond. 
The darkness brings out no distant stars, the 
day awakes no great soulful songs. There's 
nothing to lose, nothing to gain, no hazard of 
great destinies — dry, dull, dead. Sometimes 
the dullness is relieved by the backward plunge 
into our animal nature through the lower vent 
of life — the senses, passions, and vices of the 
soul. This is simply the way of death. For if 
the bugle call of the soul be ''forward" — and 
who will doubt it? — then "backward, back- 
ward," must ever be the death knell. 

But the book is not complete at this point. 
The author, though realistic, does not belong 
to the school of realism. In his search he has 
discovered himself. In looking for an outer 
world he stumbles upon an inner world. 



The Book of Books 

Listen ! '1 have considered the task which God 
hath given to the sons of men, to exercise them- 
selves withal. He hath made everything beau- 
tiful in its season. He hath also put the world 
into their heart; only they understand not the 
work of God from beginning to end.'' 

God hath made everything beautiful in its 
season, and we have considered man's task in 
seeking out that beautiful in the outer world. 
But now we come upon the strange and dis- 
turbing fact that there is an inner world, a 
heart-world, only we cannot understand it. 
This heart-world is a mystery waiting to be 
revealed. 

All through the book there are gleams and 
flashes and disturbing monitions of this heart- 
world mingling with the outer world of pleas- 
ure, afifairs, and knowledge. Yet our author 
does not project the heart- world as a work of 
the imagination. Had he done so he would 
have given us a romance, '^a vision from his 
own heart and not out of the mouth of the 
Lord." For romance is but the ideal projection 
of the heart-world. From the realistic shores 
of sin and sorrow and toil we sail in the good 
ship Imagination for our Arcady, for the land 
where everything comes out right; where the 

29 



Unto Heights Heroic 

wicked finally cease from troubling. We shall 
always love the romance, sweet refuge of weary 
hours. It has its blessed ministry, but life itself 
does not lie in that direction. What indeed are 
the great human dreams of immortality but the 
projection over and over again of this heart- 
world. 

But our author takes still another course. 
The heart-world is not to be projected, but 
awaits its own unfolding. The book like a 
mountain torrent rushes on. Like a man fight- 
ing his way through the tangled underbrush, it 
pushes for the open glade. And the light of 
the opening glade comes first in snatches 
through the foliage, growing at last into un- 
broken light in those memorable words, 'This 
is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: 
fear God, and keep his commandments; for this 
is the whole duty of man.'' 

And this is no mere escape, no making the 
best of a bad case, but the aim from the begin- 
ning, the goal enhanced and glorified by the 
method and way of approach. 

One thing stands out above all others, and 
that is the unabashed strength of the author's 
heart. The heart-world may be a mystery, yet 
a mystery he will never surrender. Uncrushed 

30 



« 



The Book of Books 

by the defeats of this world, unallured by the 
dreams of another, he holds right on in the 
strength of his soul. And the goal is not a 
book, but a Being, There is no final book, but 
there is a final Being. 'Tear God, and keep his 
comandments." This is the ''whole duty." 
Nay, literally read, "the whole of man,'' the 
whole story of man. "Rejoice, O young man, 
in thy youth'' — throw open the gates of thy 
being, give vent to thy nature. Let all that is 
in thee rise to its utmost. Make the most of 
thy soul forces, of brain and eye, of heart and 
hand. "But know that God will bring thee into 
judgment." All must be marshaled under the 
divine scrutiny; held to the divine criticism; 
shaped by the divine thought and judgment. 
For this and this alone is the whole of man. 
Only this comprehends the v/hole story of man. 
This gives the higher vent of life — the open 
road of the soul. 

According, then, to our author life is no mad 
plunge into this world, no mere dream of an- 
other, but an heroic unfolding of what is in us, 
the evolving of the heart- world through God. 

And this is the thought of the Bible itself. 
In the Epistle to the Hebrews we have a long 
line of heroes. If we go back to their history 

31 



Unto Heights Heroic 

the secret of their heroism is out. They met 
God, this one at the bush, that one by the brook, 
and this again under the oak. And it was the 
Hero-God. Wherever or whenever he appeared 
it was as the Hero of life, the inner life, the 
heart-world. Around this meeting has grown 
the Bible. It is realistic but not realism. No 
nature-God is ever made the hero. No litera- 
ture grew about the molten calf. It is idealistic 
but not idealism. It never swings off into 
romance; never seeks the dream-world. That 
tendency drifts of its own accord into the 
pageantry of the Apocrypha. It is the book 
of the heart-world evolving through the divine 
Hero. It is not a dream-world of the imagina- 
tion, but the real world of revelation, the heart- 
world, unfolding in the midst of the great 
world, weaving into its wonderful story hints 
of nature, intuitions of the soul, and dreams of 
the world, shaping them all to the higher end — 
unfolding and unfolding till finally from the 
matchless heart fell the matchless words, "Let 
not your heart be troubled. In my Father's 
house are many mansions: I go to prepare a 
place for you." 

Life, then, is not an enfolding of the outer 
world in terms of pleasure, knowledge, or pos- 

32 



The Book of Books 

sessions, but the unfolding of the heart-world 
in terms of faith, hope, and love. It is the mas- 
tery of the outer through the inner. Is not this 
the best word of modern philosophy? Life is 
not an impression, but an expression. It is 
something to be given, not gotten. There's a 
world to be made, not found. The sooner we 
grasp this thought the better. We are not 
paupers begging our way through the world, 
whining when stones are given for bread and 
serpents for fish. We are princes strewing our 
pathway with the largess of the soul. It is this 
heroic role through the Hero-God that leaves 
all such ancient legends as 'Vanity of vanities" 
far behind. 

It was at this very point that life took on a 
new meaning to the author; that turned the 
world from 'Vanity'' into substance. ''Cast thy 
bread upon the waters." Do you want a better 
world to live in ? Make it better. Cast forth 
what is in you, and the whole earth and sea and 
sky shall change its hue. 

*'Sow thy seed in the morning. 

And slack not thy hand in the evening, 

And the light shall be sweet to thee." 

Sow, sow thyself. And what goes forth as seed 
(3) 33 



Unto Heights Heroic 

and toil will return in a larger, sweeter light; 
will bless thy last hours with a glorious sunset. 

"When the clouds are full of rain 
They empty it upon the earth." 

This is the divine order : when things are full 
they overflow and create a new wealth along 
their path — trees and grass and flowers. Pour 
out what is in thee and see if the flowers will 
not spring up all about thee with their fra- 
grance and beauty. The great world must 
come to its best through the heart-world. 
Think of the infinite resources of this heart- 
world from imagination to hope, from fancy to 
faith, from logic to love. The world is not 
dying for the cattle on a thousand hills, nor for 
the mountain-locked gold, but for the divine 
wealth of the soul. 

How apt, therefore, is the exhortation of our 
author, followed by that strange but beautiful 
death-song of this very heart-world : ''Remem- 
ber now thy Creator in the days of thy youth'' 
— while this inner world is at flood-tide of 
youthful powers, when under the brooding of 
the divine Hero they shall rise to their noblest; 
"Before the sun groweth dark;" before the 
spring-tide of joy be gone, and the exuberance 

34 



The Book of Books 

of life be lost; before ''the windows be dark- 
ened, and the doors shall be shut on the 
streets;'' before the world is too much for our 
craven hearts, and we would shut out all sights 
and sounds of the noisy world-street; before 
*'the daughters of music be brought low;" be- 
fore the strong swinging lyric of the soul loses 
its power to redeem men; before ''the silver 
cord be loosed" — nerve gone, courage flabby, 
the cords of life too slack to speed the arrow of 
effort; before "the pitcher be broken," and we 
can no longer turn and dip life from the pure 
fountains of God; before the heart-world has 
fallen into decay, its powers gone, its forces 
vanished, its future lost — nothing to evolve, 
nothing to give, nothing to put into the great 
world with living, creative force. 

35 



LITERATURE, 
The BooK of tHe Meeting 



"The cygnet finds the water ; but the man 
Is born in ignorance of his element, 
And feels out blind at first, disorganized 
By sin i' the blood — his spirit insight dulled 
And crossed by his sensations. Presently 
He feels it quicken in the dark sometimes : 
When mark be reverent, be obedient — 
For such dumb motions of imperfect life 
Are oracles of vital Deity." 

— Mrs, Browning, 

"How dared I let expand the force 
Within me, till some out-soul whose resource 
It grew for should direct it? Every law 
Of life, its every fitness, every flaw. 
Must One determine whose corporeal shape 
Would be no other than the prime escape 
And revelation to me of a Will 
Orblike o'ershrouded and inscrutable 
Above, save at the point which, I should know, 
Shone that myself, my powers, might overflow." 

— Browning. 



THE BOOK OF THE MEETING 

" And he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant 
which was found in the house of the Lord." — 2 Kings xxiii, 2. 

One of the first thoughts of life is that we 
have fallen heir to the universe. The blue sky 
and velvet turf; the daisied fields and mysteri- 
ous mountains; the song of the brook and the 
laughter of children; the quiet of the home and 
the hum of the market, all wait on us with their 
ministries. We are heirs of all there is. But 
another thought follows hard upon this, that 
the value of the great world's ministry is all 
dependent upon the character of the inner 
world, the heart-world. In vain will the dis- 
tant star beckon to the holden eyes. In vain 
will nature's harmonies fall upon the discordant 
soul. And in vain will heroic destinies appeal 
to the sordid heart. They are indeed minister- 
ing spirits sent forth to minister, but only 
to those who are heirs, real heirs, ''heirs of 
salvation." 

The real burden of life, then, is not in the 
great world about us, but in the little world 
within us. How to work out God's purpose 
there, how to bear the burden of our own 

39 



Unto Heights Heroic 

divinity, how to achieve our birthright — this is 
the real burden, and in all the long history of 
the v^orld but one man ever dared to say, ''My 
burden is light." And he was the One who 
kept a lifelong tryst with God, the One in 
whom heaven and earth met, in whom the 
divine and human blended. 

This very idea of life, the meeting of the 
divine and human in man, lies at the heart, is 
the compelling mystery, of all great literatures. 
The songs, stories, and dramas of history are 
the struggle of man to find somewhere on the 
world's great battlefield the divine Hero of this 
life we are striving to live, some One who can 
meet us in life's stress and carry us over into 
life's victory, descending to our level that he 
may lift us to his. 

The great classics have failed at this very 
point. They have failed to effect this meeting. 
Their aspirations are flung back upon moaning 
hearts. Their heroes escape to the underworld. 
Their dramas break down in confusion. 

'Tailing with their weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God, 
They stretch lame hands of faith and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff." 

40 



The Book of the Meeting 

It is a daring thought this that lies at the 
heart of great Hteratures. It is the free spirit 
of man going forth to meet the free Spirit of 
God. It is the passion of communion. From 
one side the human wanderer is groping his 
way outward. From the other the divine Hero 
is moving inward. Will they ever meet? All 
human literatures have wrought on this prob- 
lem. The classic writer failed because he could 
never think his way past nature's laws, human 
conditions, and heredity. 

''God was trying to speak with him and he was trying to 
hear, 

But the angry roar of an angry sea 

Had told his soul it was not free; 
And his strange imperfect ear 
Had only caught on the breast of day 
The strain of a song that was far away." 

Through freedom we make our way to God. 
But freedom is not a question in thinking, but 
in living. It is a task not to be thought out 
through logic, but wrought out through love. 
Therefore the way to God is no thought jour- 
ney but a great life journey. The whole man 
must be in it plunging to depths of penitence 
and rising to heights of faith. It is a strange, 
wild, dramatic journey, and it is life from start 

41 



UxTO Heights Heroic 

to finish. God may not always be within range 
of man's thought, but he is always within range 
of his life. 

The book of the meeting, of the coming to- 
gether of God and man, then, will never be a 
work of science, nor philosophy, nor theology", 
nor yet a work of the imagination. It will be a 
fragment of real life, a segment of human his- 
tory, stranger than fiction, sublimer than phi- 
losophy, and more substantial than science. 

Xow, in the days of King Josiah such a book 
was found, buried away in the temple under the 
dust of years. They called it the book of the 
covenant, primarily the coming together of God 
and man. 

The origin of the book carries us back into 
the depths of history, into a soul's experience. 
It grew about the life of ^Moses. AMiatever de- 
velopments may have followed through appre- 
ciative interpreters of after years, the core of 
this scripture is the tr}^st hour of God and 
Closes. It IS one of the sublimest chapters in 
all the stor}" of man, flooded with a light that is 
not of this world. 

Briefly the story runs thus : Moses is born on 
the banks of the Nile. The mother looks into 
her child's eyes and reads the promises. But 

42 



The Book of the Meeting 

what avail the promises? For there is the 
king's decree. Then God plays the pity of a 
princess over against the king's decree, and the 
love of a mother over against the king's court, 
and a vision of the Invisible over against the 
king's empire. Yes, pity, love, and visions are 
mightier in this great life battle than decrees, 
courts, and empires. The product is a young 
man with the fire mists of a new world within 
him. A modern writer has said, "None but 
yourself shall you meet on the highway of 
Fate. If Judas go forth to-night it is toward 
Judas his steps will tend." Then we can never 
get beyond ourselves. Life rushes round and 
round in a circle. Where, then, is progress? 
This is pure fatalism. This is the thought of 
the Greek tragedy, but not the thought of the 
Hebrew Bible, not the deepest intuitions of life. 
Judas may meet no one but himself in the road 
of fate. But I dare affirm that even in Judas 
there is not only the constructed man, made 
thus and so, shaped for fate; but there is also 
a constructive force, the possibilities of a new 
man, the fire mists of an unborn life, the germ 
of a world that might be. If he follow this, he 
shall meet God and not himself. 
This fire burned in Moses. It was the fire of 
43 



Unto Heights Heroic 

creative love, the fire of divine chivalry. He 
went forth not along the highway of fate, but 
of freedom. Every blow was a liberty blow 
for the slave, the brother, the maidens. The 
bush burned in him before it burned at the foot 
of Horeb. Sometimes we smother the burning 
within and never come to the burning without; 
to the bush that flames, and the voice that 
speaks — to God, and life's great destiny. 

It was not so much a meeting of thought, of 
council, as of spirit. Not two souls with a 
single thought, but two souls with a common 
burden, a single purpose. It is in our purpose, 
not our thought, we command our destiny. 
We may be very poor in thought, but if we are 
rich in purpose the new world is not far off. 
Moses had many things to learn, but in one 
thing his spirit and God's burned to the same 
end, with redeeming purpose, with creative love 
for the soul, for the heart-world. We shall 
never understand the full meaning of that hour, 
nor any other such hour, when God and man 
meet in a similar relation, with the same com- 
mon burden. It is the birth hour of new 
worlds, new churches, new souls resplendent 
with divine possibilities. All history has been 
struggling to utter the meaning of that hour 

44 



The Book of the Meeting 

when the ciy of the human reached heaven; 
when the high meaning of Hfe centered in the 
hands clasped between God and man. 

The real coming together, however, of God 
and Moses is a process that invites a deeper 
analysis. There are two or three suggestive 
expressions in the story of the meeting. One 
is the strange name God gave himself — the 'T 
Am." Laying aside all the metaphysical inter- 
pretations that have clustered around the name, 
what is tne first practical impression awakened 
by it? '1 Am." Why, that is the very thing 
I am not ! That is just the thing I cannot say 
about myself, yet the very thing I am forever 
striving for. I want to be. Some scholars 
make el, the root word for God, to mean goal, 
the aim or end toward which we strive. No 
doubt the first practical thought of life is not 
about our source, but our goal. We are phi- 
losophers before we ask w^hence we came. But 
the moment we begin to live we are striving 
toward something or some one. We know that 
the great struggle of our humanity is to be — to 
be more and more. The burden of all history, 
full of thought, passion, and tragedy is the 
story of "I want to be." Is it not the burden of 
every boy's life, "I want to be this," 1 want to 

4S 



Unto Heights Heroic 

be that/' as he pursues the ever vanishing and 
deepening ideals ? 

"God is— 
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 

Now, it is on this wonderful road of "I want 
to be'' God meets us. He never meets us on any- 
other. It is the road strewn with the wreckage 
of discarded ideals; the road of godly sorrow; 
every abandoned wreck stained with the tears 
of repentance; the road of faith, of life's ex- 
pression, ever new, ever higher, ever holier. 

It was along this road that God met Moses. 
You can imagine the time when all the world- 
ideals were flashing before him, when he said, 
'1 want to be a soldier, I want to be a states- 
man, I want to be a king." One after another 
they hung before him till through the deepening 
light of the 'Invisible" they finally faded out of 
sight. 

"There are flashes struck from midnights, 
There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 

Whereby piled up honors perish, 
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle." 

Then I think another set of ideals of a 
Hebrew character hovered over him when he 
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's 

46 



The Book of the Meeting 

daughter, but chose rather to be called the son 
of a Hebrew daughter. These were moral and 
spiritual ideals, the higher, diviner thought 
of life, the higher expression of life, when he 
was saying, 'T want to be an Abraham, 
a Jacob, a prince of the house of Israel — ^yes, 
a Messiah." 

But what is the full significance of this great 
Mosaic ambition? What does it mean? We 
are still at the bush, and God throws upon the 
man a tremendous task. And from him is 
wrung the query, ''What am I that you . . . ?" 
The answer is simply this : ''Moses, when you 
have taken up the task and carried it to its ful- 
fillment you will have answered your own ques- 
tion." God has a very practical way of teach- 
ing us what we are. The moral stature and 
spiritual consciousness of life are wrought into 
us by the work we do — worked in that it may 
be worked out again, as the sun weaves the 
dew, air, and earth into the plant that the plant 
may in turn unfold into the flower. God is 
always working for the flowering of life. 

He was working for the flowering of Moses 
— the great outer events growing into one 
sublime inner event. And that event was when 
Moses went into Pharaoh's presence, in the 

47 



Unto Heights Heroic 

name of the people, and said, "God has sent me 
to tell you to let my son go." 

This is the answer to Moses's question, ''A 
son of God/' John Fiske says, 'The lesson of 
evolution is that through all these weary ages 
the human soul has not been cherishing in re- 
ligion a delusive phantom, but in spite of sun- 
dry endless groping and stumbling it has been 
rising to the recognition of its essential kinship 
with the everlasting God." This great lesson 
of evolution was long ago forestalled in the 
story of Moses — first the story, and then the 
science of the story. ''Sons of God" — that 
thought has revolutionized the world. Make 
room for the sons of God. Build the house 
larger and larger. Let my sons go. 

Out of this new relation must grow great 
commandments, the principles of the new life. 
Henceforth man's relation to God is more es- 
sential than to earth, sea, and air, with their 
fatalistic laws. 

''Closer is he than breathing, 
And nearer than hands and feet." 

Never again 

'•'Shall the angry roar of an angry sea 
Prove to the soul it is not free." 

48 



The Book of the Meeting 

It is said that when Goethe first met Herder 
his soul was in a ferment. He needed some 
master, some great personaUty who should help 
him to find himself. He found such a one in 
Herder. Moses found such a one in God. 
God helped Moses to find himself. The first 
product of the meeting was a book, the book 
the great world poets tried to write and could 
not. It is the book of the covenant, of the 
meeting. There must always be a book, for the 
glory of flaming bushes must not be lost. 
Earth is too poor, and heavenly visions too 
rare, to let them escape us. And the book 
will grow into a library of books shaping the 
world in the interest of this newborn son of 
God. 

But instead of turning now to the books let 
us go a little deeper into the -finding process. 
We are often cautioned against reading too 
much into our great men. We have a horror of 
myths. Let us rather fear lest we fail to find 
the half that is in them, and the world perish 
for bread. A truly great man will blossom 
many times, every century. He is God's cen- 
tury plant. 

In the ordinary fairy story a world made to 
order is supplied for the hero fitting at every 
(4) 49 



Unto Heights Heroic 

point. Ill the real story of life the hero must 
make his own world. Real life is more diffi- 
cult, but more divine. There is nothing of the 
fairy flavor about the story of Moses. No 
future cut and dried, made easy and beautiful, 
stretched before him. He went forth to carve 
his own future; to make his own world; to find 
himself through God. 

The supreme fact in his life w^as God's pres- 
ence. Then the general fact of God's presence 
grew into a specific fact in his own experience. 
He felt 

^'A presence that disturbed him with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts." 

Then the specific fact grew into something 
more than a fact. Why did God so persistently 
urge this fact upon Moses ? Why did he press 
it at every turn ? Why did he repeat it over and 
over? "Surely I will be with thee." Was it 
not an education, an informing? Informing in 
the true sense — forming within; not of a fact, 
but of God himself. While great things were 
transpiring about Moses a greater, diviner 
thing is taking place in him. It is God forming 
himself within the man. A God-conscious man 
is being born — a man who shall know the pain- 

50 



The Book of the Meeting. 

ful joy of divine thoughts, divine feelings, 
divine deeds. 

Still the process of self-discovery demands 
another fact : not only the presence of God, but 
the presence of the world. The world was with 
him. Indeed, it was in him — the heritage of 
the past; the wisdom of Egypt; the blood of 
princes; the great wild world about him. 

If God be in us the world must also be there; 
for God always keeps in touch with his world. 
And it is through the meeting of these two 
counterforces that we rise to our best, that we 
discover ourselves. When a small boy attempts 
for the first time to cross a raging river on a 
log he is told just to keep his eyes on the log — 
to let nothing swerve him from that. Slowly, 
cautiously, the little feet move out. The river 
rages beneath him; he sees it, feels it, it sweeps 
and swirls through his soul. For a moment he 
is seized with panic between log and river. 
Then his eye catches the log again and holds it 
firm. When he steps down on the other side 
he is a new boy. He is conscious of a strange 
new mastery within him. He is coming to his 
best, as Browning suggests that Michael stands 
the calmer and nobler for the writhing of the 
snake beneath his feet. Your saint who sails 

51 



UxTO Heights Heroic 

out of sight of earth wiU never come to his best. 
Your worldHng who Hves hke a mole out of 
sight of heaven will never come to his best. It 
is the man in whom heaven and earth meet, just 
as Jesus rose to his best when through the calm 
of heaven he quelled the rage of the world. In 
his life two worlds met as they must in all true 
lives. In him the troubled sea of life broke 
against the infinite shore. His was the life of 
the breakers, and that was its glory. 

But this thought naturally brings us to an- 
other. Some one will be shocked at the idea of 
the world being in us. Why ! is not the idea of 
life to keep the world out of us? Yes, that is 
one; but there is another better one. The world 
is in our life, but it is there in a strange new 
way: not as life, but as the material out of 
w^hich life is made, through which we find life, 
through which we both discover and reveal our- 
self; as nature is in the life of the artist, as 
material for pictures; as thoughts and events 
are in the life of the poet, as material for 
poems; as the whole great world was in the life 
of Jesus Christ, as material for a new world to 
be born by the travail of his own soul. In this 
way we rise lo our best. Through this we 
reach the fullness of our power. 

52 



The Book of the Meeting 

Moses appears in several of the books. He is 
a striking figure moving in and out through 
the narrative — sometimes calm, sometimes 
shaken; now dumb with sorrow, now breaking 
into song; now raging at the people, and now 
pleading with God; a wonderful man. You 
would never tire of following such a career. 

But in one book Moses rises to his best; and 
that is Deuteronomy, the power book of the 
Pentateuch. There you get the most of Moses 
— the stretch of soul, the pathos of patience, 
the sublimity of passion, and the divinity of 
thought. Through the book resounds the cry 
of the human, but chastened and tempered by 
the breath of God it comes to us in such strange 
heroic eloquence as no other book supplies. 

The book is just throbbing with the man, 
and the man at his best. Here with eye fixed 
upon the Eternal Rock he rises into the heroic 
mastery of that wild human river that had 
sometimes swept him away. But there is more 
than mastery here. Here the world is with 
him, even in him, lying like a burden upon his 
soul — the wrecked, shattered, wayward, disap- 
pointing world. But his soul takes fire of God. 
The creative impulse swells within him. The 
old world is a possibility, the material for a new 

53 



Unto Heights Heroic 

and nobler world. The muse is there, the 
divinest muse, the muse of redemption. And 
this broken, disappointed, sorrow-riven soul 
lifts the old world into song — a song that to 
this day falls like the rain and distills like the 
dew on the seared fields of life. 

I hardly dare approach the silent but un- 
paralleled eloquence of that last scene when the 
message came from the mysterious mountain; 
when he rose in heroic majesty above a broken 
life, and the unfinished task; when with eye un- 
dimmed and step unshaken he went out calmly 
beyond the vision of man; when the fragment 
of his own life caught hold of God and was 
made complete. 

'Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable 
Name? 
Builder and Maker thou, of houses not made with 
hands : 
What! have fear of change from thee who art ever the 
same ? 
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power 
expands? 
There shall never be one lost good ! 

On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven the perfect 
round.*' 

54 



LITERATURE 
The BooK of L-ife 



''Comrado, I give you my hand ! 

I give you my love more precious than money. 

I give you myself before preaching or law : 

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with 

me? 
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?" 

— Whitman, 

"All things through thee take nobler form, 

And look beyond the earth ; 
The mill-round of our fate appears 

A sun-path in thy worth. 
Me, too, thy nobleness has taught 

To master my despair : 
The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship iaiv.''— Emerson. 



THE BOOK OF LIFE 

"And when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee." — Prov. vi, 22. 

There are two kinds of books : the book that 
instructs, that widens the scope of our knowl- 
edge, that makes our horizon larger — brings 
more facts within it. A very important book, 
it fills our world with material for use. Then 
there is another book — one that talks with us, 
speaks to us, hunts us out. It is not so anx- 
ious to increase our knowledsfe as to increase 
us; to draw us out, wake us up, inspire us, 
move us. The two kinds of books have been 
called ''books of knowledge" and ''books of 
power." 

The first book is full of facts, only facts. 
The personal element is avoided that we may 
get the facts, untouched, untinged, clean-cut, 
cold, dry. 

The second book has facts, but also some- 
thing more. The facts are magnetized by the 
writer. Every word is red-hot with his person- 
ality. Every thought is tinged with his soul. 
There is some one in the book, therefore it 
speaks, holds converse with us, is one of the 

57 



Unto Heights Heroic 

immortal companions of life. The fact books 
die; in the progress of knowledge new facts 
supersede the old ones. But the personality 
book lives forever. 

The Bible is such a book — the greatest of all 
talking books, the holiest and most helpful of 
all companions. 

The characters of the book speak to us 
through the facts — Abraham through his oak, 
Jacob through his well, and David through his 
city. Oak, well, and city are all touched into 
eloquence by the men who touched them. And 
the writers speak to us through its characters — 
through Saul and Samuel and David. Through 
them they speak a larger, diviner, more 
varied language. Through a thousand frag- 
ments of men they tell the great story of uni- 
versal man. Then God speaks to us through 
the writers. They are moved by God and 
swing out in song and story and prophecy far 
beyond all boundaries until the story of man 
becomes the larger story of God and man — yes, 
of the God-man. For when he came he said, 
'They are they that testify of me." At the 
heart of the book, then, is this divine-human 
Personality who speaks to us in the language of 
literature. For literature is the language of 

58 



The Book of Life 

personality. It is the unfolding, the overflow, 
the outburst of the personal yearning toward 
the personal. 

The Bible comes to us in this personal lan- 
guage. It has the lyrical speech. 

Sometimes a young man will come to us in 
trouble. He opens his heart. We listen, we ana- 
lyze. We can make but little out of the medley, 
only this : down in his life there is a longing — 
perhaps not a very strong one, only the smok- 
ing flax. But it is there hampered, hedged in, 
and smothered by conditions and circum- 
stances. 

We might enter into plans, ways, and means 
with him. But we feel he needs something 
more, something naked words cannot effect, 
something to strengthen his heart, something 
to fan the fire. His future is not in new plans, 
but in that smoldering fire. He needs inspira- 
tion — something that can reach and help the 
longing buried in there among the impossi- 
bilities. 

We have had such experiences ourselves. We 
have felt weak, helpless, baffled. We did not 
want any new philosophy of the way, but just 
a voice, a friendly voice, a sympathetic voice — 
something to start tlie eclio in us, to start the 

59 



Unto Heights Heroic 

song. We could sing if some one would raise 
the tune for us. 

Do you see? The ministry of song. It is 
one of the first ministries of life. There is the 
cradle song. Do you think its only ministry is 
to sing the child to sleep? Indeed, its great 
ministry is to sing the soul awake. 

**Still linger in our noon of time, 

And on our Saxon tongue, 
The echoes of the home-born hymns 

The Aryan mothers sung. 

"And childhood had its litanies 

In every age and clime; 
The earliest cradles of the race 

Were rocked to poet's rhyme." 

And there are the songs of manhood, carrying 
life out and up with a larger, stronger sweep : 

'*0 our manhood's prime vigor ! No spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew un- 
braced. 
O, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to 
rock." 

Then, too, old age has its songs bearing even 
across the flood : 

"Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell 

When I embark: 
60 



The Book of Life 

'Tor though from out our bourn of time and place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar/' 

The Bible speaks to us in the language of 
song. It speaks to the great longing of the 
soul. It broods over our immortality, to start 
the echo, to raise the tune in us, to give us 
heart, to lift us above and carry us beyond, to 
make us conscious of our immortality, to give 
us strength, to give us life, whereby we cry, "1 
can do all things." 

The power of these old Bible songs is not 
their angelic, but their divine-human, ring. 
They reach us at all depths of our humanity 
and sing us into great heights of our divinity. 
''Why art thou cast down, O my soul? I shall 
yet praise thee for the help of thy countenance.'' 
The very power of this old psalm is the strange 
meeting of its heights and depths. It is the 
divine harmony sweeping down upon us 
through life's discords, lifting the soul from 
despair to praise. 

And these old Bible songs undertake to sing 
the multitudinous song of life : its sword songs, 
well songs, shepherd songs, battle songs, and all 
its great life songs. 

6i 



Unto Heights Heroic 

The ministry of song is one of the great 
ministries. When Isaiah saw the redeemed re- 
turning with joy upon their heads they were 
singing — singing their way to Zion. King 
Arthur's city, they said, was reared to the music 
of harps. But the great city that hath founda- 
tions is being built to the lyrics of God. 

''Truth is fair: should we forego it? 

Can we sigh right for a wrong? 
God himself is the best Poet, 

And the Real is his song." 

If now we return again to our own life, we 
find the old longing carried a step further. We 
are not just now thinking of how to surmount 
this difficulty, but how to reach that goal. It is 
not wings for the hour for which we are asking, 
but wings for the whole flight through. Feel- 
ing has passed on into thought, into ''long, 
long thoughts/' We are trying to live out 
something. 

Why do you and I like to read a story? Is 
it not because we are trying to live a story and 
make it come out right? We need something 
more than a song. We need a story. And the 
Bible speaks to us in stories; in the language 
of the Epic — real stories; stories that take hold 
of us; that suggest; that lead, and always in 

62 



The Book of Life 

the right direction. They never lead backward 
into the vile swamp of the senses. They never 
take fanciful flights into impossibilities. Real- 
istic they are, plain and simple of speech; with 
many a romantic touch, but always leading 
clearly, strongly, swiftly toward the heights of 
manhood and womanhood. Call to mind 
Joseph, Ruth, David, Samuel, or the great 
tragedies that by contrast lead in the same 
direction. 

Then all these fragment stories are woven 
into one whole story. It is more than the story 
of men, it is the story of man, of the soul. It 
does not simply appeal to the smaller ambitions 
of life, it appeals to the supreme ambition. 

From the very first the book suggests that 
we are God's children; that there is something 
in us that is like God. But it is only a sugges- 
tion from God, an ambition in man. The thing 
itself is not apparent at the start. It is only the 
fire mists of the soul's great story waiting to be 
developed through the converse of God and 
man. 

And the converse is shaped to the speech of 
man; for God always talks with us, not to us. 
This IS an ofifense to some people who think 
God should have spoken, in the world's child- 

63 



Unto Heights Heroic 

hood, in the language of the full-orbed present- 
day science. 

God talks with man. He gives and takes. 
He takes the crudities of one generation, 
breathes into them the larger, rounder, com- 
pleter life, and hands them back to the next. 

So God tells the story of the soul. Rather 
he makes us tell our own story, working out 
that divine ambition within us, that vague like- 
ness of God. At length we find ourselves read- 
ing life in the light of God's own ''Son." Then 
the full meaning of life sweeps over us; the 
supreme ambition takes form, while life's un- 
reached possibilities flash upon us in the ''Son." 
"Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and 
it doth not yet appear what we shall be :" but 
"we shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
he is." 

Returning once more to our own life, we are 
led to ask. Is this story of the soul possible? 
Can this great story of the ages become an 
experience in each individual ? 

If the Bible were to follow the ordinary lan- 
guage of literature we should expect it to speak 
now in the language of the drama. But at this 
point the ways part. And very deep and sig- 
nificant is the parting of the ways. 

64 



The Book of Life 

While we are crying out for strength to live 
out the great Hfe of the soul, no mere dramatic 
scene passes before us. The Bible is decidedly 
dramatic, but the critics say it has no pure 
drama. In place of it there is the literature of 
prophecy — the literature of a Presence. Was 
it the real dead-in-earnest prophetic intuitions 
of Mrs. Browning that made her say, "I will 
write no plays" ? In prophecy God speaks face 
to face. Its language is more than language, 
it IS life. 

In Browning's "Saul" we have the story of 
Saul's insanity; and David comes to redeem 
him from it. First he sings and plays, and Saul 
wakens slowly, then falls back again. Then he 
takes up the king's life and stirs his ambition. 
Slowly the great man rises again, only to fall 
back. Then the young shepherd abandons song 
and story and offers himself. He'll lay down 
his own life for the king. ' But even this is 
powerless to redeem him. Finally, in a frenzy 
of divine despair, he obliterates himself, leaving 
the Christ standing in his place. "See the 
Christ stand." 

How like the Bible! — God in his songs; God 
in the great story of life; then God face to face, 
his life poured out. 

(5) 65 



Unto Heights Heroic 

It begins in the garden. The essence of 
prophecy is not a prediction but a presence. 
But where there is the presence language will 
project itself beyond the boundaries. Language 
will grasp the future because the future itself 
is present. 

There is the first sin, and God hunting the 
sinner down^ as he has hunted us down many 
and many a time in our own experience. He 
hunts us down; faces us with plain speech. 

These face-to-face talks of God are plain of 
speech because God is talking to his own. As 
a boy said the other day, overhearing a conver- 
sation in which great plainness of speech was 
used, ^'Why, they talk as though they were re- 
lated.'' God speaks plainly because we are 
related to him. He cuts deep because he is 
ready to pour out his life for us. He is the 
most ruthless critic of life, and the most appre- 
ciative, the most sympathetic. He analyzes us, 
takes us apart, till every part lies naked in his 
hand condemned or approved in the white light 
of his judgment. Then in upon the dead, dy- 
ing, quivering parts he pours his life till they 
live again, stand erect, radiant with a new life. 
''The angel of his presence hath redeemed 
them." We know the power of a presence in 

66 



The Book of Life. 

our own life. A skeptic once said to me, *'I can 
sweep away the arguments of the philosophers, 
but not the presence of my mother." 

And the Bible is always growing into a pres- 
ence, a life, a reality, through the prophets. 

"Aye, and while your common men 
Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, 
And dust the flaunting carpets of the world 
For kings to walk on or our President, 
The prophet suddenly will catch them up 
With his voice like a thunder — This is soul, 
This is life, this word is being said in heaven, 
Here's God down on us I What are you about?' " 

The book is forever growing into a presence; 
dissolving at times into the great world history, 
but resolving again into the divine Presence. 
It is the same face with its assuring light, the 
same heart with its redeeming blood. In his- 
toric form once he came. In spiritual redeem- 
ing presence he forever and forever comes. 

**But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 

A present help is he; 
And faith has yet its Olivet, 

And love its Galilee. 

*'0 Lord and Master of us all, 

Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own thy sway, we hear thy call, 

We test our lives by thine 1" 

67 



HISTORY 
THe Crossed Hands 



"The real and consoling truth is that our free will can 
modify our original nature. The dark problem of 
heredity need not oppress us with an eternal burden; 
and a revolt of our personality can often cast to the 
winds the tyranny of ancestral traits, and the crippling 
restraint of outgrown creeds." — Victor Charhonnel. 

"O my God, I will live. But I shall not truly live 
unless thou makest thyself felt in the involuntary im- 
pulses of my being. I will live by thee. Be thoii God of 
my will." — Ibid. 

"God is the great companion of man, the loving yet 
terrible friend of his inmost soul." — John Cotter Mor- 



THE CROSSED HANDS 

'* And Israel stretched out his righ*^ hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's 
head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, 
guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn. . . . And 
said, . . . The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads." 
— Gen. xlviii, 14-16. 

**And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, . . . That I may tell you 
that which shall befall you in the last days." — Gen. xlix, i. 

The story of one man at this point branches 
into the story of many. It is no longer one 
colossal figure, like Abraham, but twelve frag- 
ments of the Abrahamic life, and each frag- 
ment an individual that will again subdivide, 
till men have grown to families, and families to 
tribes, and tribes to nations. This is history. 

Moved by the old Abrahamic faith, fire, am- 
bition, handed down the royal line, Joseph 
brings his two sons to be adopted into Jacob's 
family. The adoption will give them a place in 
the succession of Israel. 

When the father brings the boys for the 
blessing he presents, according to the custom, 
the elder, Manasseh, for the right hand, and the 
younger, Ephraim, for the left, giving the elder 
the first place. But the trembling hands of the 
old seer cross themselves, the right resting 
upon Ephraim and the left upon Manasseh. 
And when the father resisted, saying, ''You are 

71 



Unto Heights Heroic 

making a mistake/' the old man replied, ^'Nay, 
I know, I know." 

The mystery of the crossed hands — the first 
is last, and the last first. One man designed by 
birth and training for a chief is superseded by 
another who has never entered into our calcu- 
lations. 

What is the mystery of the crossed hands? 
Why does one man live, and live, and live 
through all the centuries, and another perish 
from the memory of man? Why does the 
course of life in families, churches, nations, 
take such strange directions, baffling all proph- 
ecy and confounding all science? 

Is, there a clear and simple gospel of progress 
that throws light upon the mystery? This is 
the burning question of philosophy to-day. 
Our modern truth-hunters have left the airy 
realms of abstraction and are plunging elbow- 
deep into the hard facts of everyday life, trying 
to break the seven seals, trying to open the 
book — the great book of history — and win 
therefrom the secret of God. This is the 
attempt of our social studies, 

"As with fingers of the blind 
We are groping here to find 
What the hieroglyphics mean." 

72 



The Crossed Hands 

When Kidd takes us with him through the 
maze of London Hfe we are dazed and baffled. 
At last he stops before the church, and we are 
reheved to think the quest ends here. But 
when he proceeds to give us fifteen different 
definitions of religion we are puzzled again, 
till at last in his final analysis he brings them 
down to a supernatural power. But this super- 
natural power is also the basis of the Bible. 
Then, instead of following the weary way of 
the philosopher, let us turn to this old Bible 
story, dig into its depths, and learn what it has 
to say about the mystery of the crossed hands. 

Tennyson has said that if we could under- 
stand a flower, what it is, root and all, and all 
in all, we should know what God and man are. 
And if we can go to the bottom of this old Bible 
story root and all, and all in all, we shall find 
the gospel of history. 

The first thing we notice in this scene around 
the dying patriarch is Joseph bringing his sons 
for Jacob's blessing. There was no doubt a 
fine chance for the boys in Egypt. Great world 
opportunities were there. But Joseph turns 
his back upon them all and leads his two sons 
over to an old chief without a country, and 
dying at that. 

n 



Unto Heights Heroic 

There were no world opportunities here, but 
there were great divine opportunities. There 
is a difference. A mere world opportunity 
offers us the world outside of us, ignoring, and 
even sometimes ruining the inner world, while 
a divine opportunity offers us the outer world 
through the inner world — first the kingdom of 
God, first the kingdom of manhood, first the 
life within, its rights to live and evolve. This 
is man's only divine right — to live — to unfold 
— to evolve. And faith claims this right. 

This led Joseph to put his sons in the suc- 
cession of the divine opportunities. He recog- 
nizes the value of environment. He believes 
it is worth something to those boys to keep step 
with such men as Abraham, to get into the 
heroic swing, to be brought up on the old songs 
and stories woven out of the heroic past. 

"Faith of our fathers ! living still 
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword: 

O how our hearts beat high with joy 
Whenever we hear that glorious word : 

Faith of our fathers ! holy faith ! 

We will be true to thee till death !" 

It is worth something to them to live under 
the inspiration of successive revelations, and 
put their hand to such a task as had been as- 

74 



The Crossed Hands 

signed his people. And he was right: the 
character of man can never be separated from 
his environment. Calvinistic creeds and Scot- 
tish mountains will make rugged men. Arca- 
dian hills and Grecian thought will carve classic 
brows. A mountainous home and border war- 
fare will make Ephraim a warrior. But this 
alone can never explain the mystery of the 
crossed hands. For see : Manasseh is the eldest. 
He is carefully trained with that thought in 
view. He has the inspiration of birth, the 
advantage of opportunity. The songs and 
stories are for him. Every influence is thrown 
around him to make him a right-hand man, and 
yet he turns out a left-hand man. And history 
is ever repeating this story: start men at the 
right hand, and they come out on the left. 
Man can never be saved by walling him in with 
privileges, though every privilege bear the face 
of an angel. 

It is a remarkable fact that nations have al- 
ways died not of their disadvantages but of 
their advantages; for advantages breed caste, 
and caste is the fatal disease of humanity. It is 
supposed to be bad on the outside, it is worse 
inside. Caste of wealth, caste of intellect, caste 
of blood, caste of religion, all fatal. Israel 

75 



Unto Heights Heroic 

Rome, and Greece all died of caste. They tell 
us the privileged classes of Europe are con- 
stantly dying at the top — sustained only by the 
replenishing again from the bottom. 

This age is making much of the word "en- 
vironment/' and there is much in it, but by no 
means the full meaning of life. It is not a full 
gospel. The secret is deeper. Of all the sons 
of Jacob the disadvantages and hardships of 
Joseph were the greatest ; yet he alone excelled. 
In any country village it is no uncommon 
thing for the son of the nabob to go to ruin, 
reeking in privileges, while the barefoot boy 
makes his way over the hard and flinty rocks 
to success. 

Turning again to our story, we find another 
very interesting feature. Jacob in blessing his 
sons characterizes them : ''Reuben, you are like 
water — unstable; no one will ever be able to 
depend upon you.'' 'Tssachar, you are like an 
ass — a beast of burden, dull and mundane." 
"No spark disturbs the clod." ''Zebulun, you 
are a seaman, restless, roving." That is, back 
of a man's opportunities are his native charac- 
teristics — heredity. Blood tells. We are the 
fruit of the ages. We grow on a tree that is 
not of our planting. We are a house built not 

7e 



The Crossed Hands 

by hands, but by the red corpuscles of the 
centuries. 

''Humanity/* says one, ''at all times of its 
existence is composed far more of the dead than 
of the living/' This is often too true, prac- 
tically true; we are more grandfather than self. 
Our grandfather was left to us, and we have 
made nothing out of him. 

Grant Allen, in his last book, proposed to 
save the world by the proper mixing of blood, 
as you breed horses. If this were possible it 
might do for the unborn, if we knew how to 
mix the blood. But it is certainly hard on the 
rest of us. We might undertake to save our- 
selves first-hand. But to do it second-hand is 
beyond us. 

This old Bible thought, coming to the sur- 
face in many places — almost a matter of faith 
as seen in the jealously guarded genealogies — 
this old thought is the divinest utterance of 
science. It has almost revolutionized the study 
of the race. It is valuable in history, nations, 
families, and men. But it is not the secret of 
the crossed hands. It is not the gospel of his- 
tory. Now and then it is put to utter confusion, 
in the crisscrossing of good and bad, of wise 
and unwise. 

11 



Unto Heights Heroic 

''Here and there a cotter's babe is royal -born by right 
divine ; 

Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his 
swine. 

Chaos, Cosmos ! Cosmos, Chaos ! once again the sicken- 
ing game." 

Where are the hereditary sons of Grecian 
genius ? where the blood children of the Roman 
patrician? where the natural descendants of 
Abraham ? 

No man can begin with his ancestors. If 
they are good, he is proud and crawls inside 
like a hermit crab. If they are bad, then he 
says, '1 am not to blame." The men in our 
prisons usually explain themselves by their 
ancestry. They hide themselves among the 
dead. The secret of the crossed hands lies 
deeper. 

Now let us turn once more to the Bible story. 
Here is a leaf out of Jacob's life : ^'The Angel 
which redeemed me from all evil, bless the 
lads." Deeper than the blessing of environ- 
ment, deeper than the blessing of inherited 
tendencies, is the blessing of the Angel. Every 
true and earnest soul living deeply, strongly, 
and divinely is conscious that his life is re- 
deemed by some One, a power not himself. 
This was Socrates's experience. This is the 

78 



The Crossed Hands 

experience of every great human figure rising 
to its conscious destiny. 

We have come, then, to the individual. Give 
your man his environment, his opportunities, 
what will he do with them ? They are not life, 
only possibilities of life. Or give him his in- 
herited tendencies, the possibilities within him. 
Still the question remains, What will he do 
with these ? 

One of Browning's characters is made to 
take a blot and develop it, shaping its rays, 
rounding it out, finally into a star. Given, then, 
the blot we call opportunities without, and tend- 
encies within, how are we to shape them into 
a star ? Who is equal to such a task ? Who can 
take this strange human blot and redeem it into 
a star ? Who has eyes, eyes to see the divine in 
the humdrum of the hour? Who knows that 
these are angels? Are they not the same old 
wayfarers who have called at our door so many 
times ? Who can always tell the difference be- 
tween a tramp and an angel ? And who under- 
stands the genius of tendencies? Who can 
grade them? Who has eyes to see them? 
Who dares say, 'This Til curb, and this Til 
cultivate, and this Til kill''? Who is such a 
master of tendencies? What will save Abra- 

79 



Unto Heights Heroic 

ham with his strange great dream of life from 
becoming a mere dreamer? What will save 
Joseph with his ambition from becoming a 
tyrant? What will save Jacob with his thrift 
from becoming a miser ? 

One thing, one only; the battle is on from the 
first — not between Jacob and Esau, but between 
Jacob and the Angel. And there by the Jabbok 
the Angel conquered. The fast fist was opened, 
and the man passed into the prince. As he 
gradually rose in response to the Angel of life 
he put his environment under tribute. Indeed, 
he put himself under tribute. He rose into the 
mastery of life through the Master of life, the 
Angel of redemption, the Hero of the soul. 

There is an Angel of redemption, a Master 
of life, a Hero of the soul, the One with whom 
you and I have wrestled at our Jabbok. Some- 
times he seems to stand in our way; he will not 
let us go over; he holds us back, and we turn 
upon him with all our force. But when he 
would leave us, seeming to give way to our 
wish, then we cry, 'T will not let thee go." 

Ah, this wrestling Angel of life! How he 
works in among the tendencies of the soul, and 
out among the opportunities of life, checking 
this ambition, shaping that aspiration, training 

80 



The Crossed Hands 

this desire. He makes the path easy here and 
hard there, the ascent now slow, now fast. The 
Angel we fear yet love, cling to yet oppose. 
Through him we rise into the mastery of life. 
Through him we command our destiny. This 
is the secret of the crossed hands. 

In the little seed we plant in the springtime 
there are three things: First, its inheritance: 
this is born a rose, that a bluebell, and this a 
pansy. Second, its environments: earth, air, 
dew, and sun. Then there is the Angel of life, 
the mystery that wrestles with the inherited 
tendencies, not to change but to master them; 
the mystery that wrestles with sun, dew, air, 
and earth, not to defeat them, but to master 
them, bringing forth the pansy, the bluebell, 
and the rose, each in its order. Just those three 
things in life — your native qualities and your 
environment, your characteristics and your 
surroundings, and the Angel of life bringing 
them into the divine mastery, making them 
throb with a newborn life, breathing upon 
them, shaping and carrying them upward into 
sons of God. 

Kidd in his suggestive book started from the 
general thought of a supernatural power. In 
his last paragraph he said, 'T find a growing 
(6) 8i 



Unto Heights Heroic 

sense of reverence in the world/' You have, 
then, taking the book as a whole, this position : 
the supernatural mystery with our faces toward 
it. This is the position throughout the Bible — 
the great mystery and man facing toward it. 

When I was a boy I used to look away upon 
the mountains. Behind the purple mists I 
imagined a world of battlefields, of lions, and 
cities. When I suggested this to another boy 
he laughed at me. But I lived many happy 
days out of that mystery. It never worked out 
as I expected — no cities, no battles, no lions. 
And one day my world faded away, giving 
place to another. 

There are many such mysteries out of which 
we live, mysteries that are the compelling 
power of great religions and great philosophies. 
Finally they topple over and fall to pieces. 

Not so this supreme mystery of the Bible, 
this Angel of life, this Hero of the soul. Out 
of him men have lived the highest masteries of 
life; out of him have mastered the past, the 
present, the future. There has been no fading 
and falling away of this mystery. It has been 
growing sublimer and sublimer, more and more 
real ; unfolding to grander and grander heights. 
And this is history. 

82 



HISTORY 
THe Heart of tKe Vision 



*'He is the axis of the star, 

He is the sparkle of the spar, 

He is the heart of every creature, 

He is the meaning of each feature; 

And his mind is the sky, 

Than all it holds more deep, more high." 

— Emerson, 

"Progress is the law of life — man's self is not yet Man ! 

For men begin to pass their nature's bound, 

And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant 

Their proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all 

The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade 

Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace 

Rises within them ever more and more." — Browning, 



THE HEART OF THE VISION 

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." — Prov. xxix, i8. 

Proverbs are born of the storm and stress of 
human history. They are the evolution of a 
people's experience; not the handiwork of 
thought, but the children of the soul. There is 
blood in them. 

This proverb is born of Israel's experience 
and leads into the heart of her history : ''Where 
there is no vision, the people perish." This old 
Hebrew history is built out of visions; out of 
what the seers saw. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, 
and Isaiah were men of visions. They saw, 
and because they saw they built. The building 
power is always born of visions. Through 
them the nerve of heaven is brought to bear 
upon the facts of earth. 

The old Hebrew world with its life, legisla- 
tion, and literature was born of visions. The 
patterns Moses saw in the mount were not like 
the patterns we mark around. They were 
visions of truth, glimpses of God and the soul, 
afterward expressed in candlesticks, draperies, 
and altars, till the whole temple throbbed with 
the presence of the living God. 

85 



Unto Heights Heroic 

Her poets were seers. They saw beyond. 
They had such visions of God as threw all 
nature into his ministry. The heavens declared 
his glory, the day was full of his speech, and 
the night shone with his knowledge. The trees 
of the field clapped their hands and the moun- 
tains and hills broke forth into singing at his 
approach. All nature was touched and tinged 
by the presence of God. 

The prophets were moral and spiritual seers. 
They saw, saw visions of a new world, a new 
age, a new man^ a God-man. With bleeding 
hands and breaking heart they built with the 
rough material at their feet. To them the 
times, the nation, all history was the great work 
field of God, and the true mission of man to toil 
by his side. 

In all this the nation was struggling through 
her visions into fellowship with God. Seeing 
beyond is always looking Godward, striving 
unto his presence. And when there is no vision, 
when we fail to look beyond, the fellowship is 
lost and the people perish; for we live by the 
fellowship of God. 

And there were times when there were no 
visions. Men saw the temple and the furniture, 
but nothing beyond. They heard no voices, felt 

S6 



The Heart of the Vision 

no great emotions. Temple-treaders, Isaiah 
called them; not listeners, not worshipers, not 
seers, but treaders. Good treaders, but souls 
are not grown in a religious treadmill. It takes 
visions. Life forever seeks the open sky, the 
larger range, the fellowship of God. 

And there were times when the singers were 
dumb; for men saw nothing, heard nothing, 
felt nothing to sing about. The earth was a 
plow field for the farmer, a pasture for the 
shepherd, and a quarry for the builder. Good 
times for grain and cattle and building, but not 
for men. It takes visions to make men. You 
can make no patriots, no true statesmen, no real 
prophets, without visions. There is always 
danger when we grow prosperous — when the 
world about us becomes too thick and gross of 
tongue to speak the speech of God; when the 
poets fail us. 

And there were times when the prophets had 
no visions from the Lord. Knowledge had in- 
creased, things amassed, the people multiplied. 
Knowledge and things and people : and people 
and things and knowledge, how shall they be 
set to the music of divine progress? What is 
lacking? The vision, the ideal, the creative 
force of heaven. Nations are not built from 

87 



Unto Heights Heroic 

the bottom up, but from the top down; not up 
from the rocks, but down from the constitution, 
the ideal, the vision. There is no art by which 
men and money and intellect can be shaped into 
a church. It can only be ''built out of heaven 
to God." And the lesson of all lessons to be 
learned is that man can never be built up from 
the earth, though we command the powers of 
heredity and the influences of environment. He 
must be built not tov^^ard the God-man, but out 
of the God-man, inheriting his mastery. Divine 
progress is not in knowledge and things and 
people, but in the mastery of the soul. Master 
souls are always the need of the age — masters 
of what we know, making every thought throb 
with the life of God; masters of what we have, 
winging every dollar with the pinions of love; 
masters of what we are, waking the cold mar- 
ble of our humanity into living statues of 
Christhood. 

But to reach the full meaning of this thought 
we need to carry our study another step, to ana- 
lyze the old Hebrew vision. What is the essen- 
tial feature of the Hebrew vision? Whence 
its great value? Why do we brush aside the 
visions of other peoples and hold that these 

Hebrew visions are the very fountains of life ? 

88 



The Heart of the Vision 

If we answer that they are supernatural, even 
this is no final answer. The word must be ex- 
changed for another greater and more vital, 
just as supernatural but more practical and 
powerful. 

If we examine one of these visions we shall 
find that the essential feature is not the lamp, 
the ladder, nor the bush. These are more or 
less indifferent to the essential fact. The essen- 
tial fact is that a divine Person is talking with 
a human being. The personal is the real 
supernatural. 

Personality is the greatest, most real, most 
practical word yet born into the language of 
man. The real God must be personal ; for only 
a person can speak, and a God who cannot 
speak for himself is no God. 

Sometimes we speak for God and shape him 
by our definitions. This is the God of our 
books, and he can take excellent care of our 
books. But the God who takes care of me must 
speak for himself, must have no sponsor. He 
must speak for himself and to me if he mold 
me into his own likeness. Kipling touches the 
point with supreme sarcasm. 'Tomlinson" has 
gone to heaven and they won't have him. He 
goes to hell and they won't have him there. 

89 



Unto Heights Heroic 

He is finally sent back to earth with the 
grewsome benediction, ''And the God that 
you took from a printed book be with you, 
Tomlinson!" 

Also the truly practical God must be per- 
sonal. There is nothing on earth so practical 
as personal force. We sometimes say of a man 
he knows enough, or he is good enough, but he 
can't do it. He lacks that something we call 
personal force; that something that makes 
things go; that something that does all the 
originating, the creative work in among the 
things of earth; that something that finds for 
its largest, highest, holiest field of operation not 
things but men. When the one perfect Person- 
ality of all history was here on earth it was 
found that the supreme art of his life was to 
reproduce himself in others, to lift men to the 
level of God. 

Now, at the heart of the Hebrew vision there 
was a personal God brooding over humanity, 
as the eagle broods over her young. The eagle 
broods over, stirs up, and thrusts forth her 
young that they may become like herself. So 
God broods over, stirs up, and thrusts out his 
men that they may become like himself. 

''We go to prove our soul." A personal God 
90 



The Heart of the Vision 

hovers around the soul as a mother hovers 
around her child. They tell me that the child 
reared in an incubator lacks the personal quali- 
ties and development of the child who has been 
under the personal care of a mother. Person- 
ality is born of personality. We love him be- 
cause he first loved us. The sequence is not of 
logic but of life. Said a kindergarten teacher 
who has under her a class of institutional chil- 
dren : ''O those institutional children ! they are 
like sticks, so dull, so unresponsive, so meaning- 
less. I would rather have the dirtiest street 
child that has been evoked and evolved by a 
mother's care.'' 

Personal development is born of a brooding 
personality. Deeper than the genius of a peo- 
ple, than all her inherited traits; deeper than her 
environment, whether of nature, history, or 
literature, is the force of a personal God in 
evoking and evolving personal life in men; 
drawing them out and up into self-mastery; 
breathing into them a keener sensitiveness, 
alive and responsive to every human voice; 
flooding them with a richness and fullness of 
life that is forever breaking its boundaries and 
sweeping into the future with immortal fore- 
casts. It is this exhaustless wealth of personal 

91 



Unto Heights Heroic 

life that puts the world forever under tribute 
to man. 

"All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 

amount : 
Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped: 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me. 
This was I worth to God." 

Now, let this idea of personality be carried 
into our life more definitely. It is often, and 
truly, said that the great proof of the inspira- 
tion of the Bible is that it inspires. Yet, like 
most epigrams, the phrase will bear some quali- 
fication. There are other books that inspire us. 
They inspire us with great thoughts, with true 
morals, with artistic fervor. But at the heart 
of the Bible there is something more than 
morals, truth, or beauty. There is a divine Per- 
sonality. The inspiration of the Bible is more 
than the inspiration of the true, the good, or 
the beautiful; it is the inspiration of Person- 
ality. It is more than an inspirational power, 
it is a redeeming power. It redeems us not 

simply to the true, the beautiful, and the good; 

92 



The Heart of the Vision 

it redeems us from self-centered individualities 
into living, loving, God-centered personalities. 
It transforms us from a whirlpool into a 
fountain. 

Personality is not only the last word to be 
said about God, it is the last word to be said 
about us. ''Be ye therefore perfect, even as 
your Father which is in heaven is perfect.'' 
This is the goal, the perfect person. The goal 
is not doctrinal but personal. And as we rise 
more and more toward that supreme goal we 
shall rise in power. What kind of power ? Per- 
sonal power. What is the Holy Spirit but the 
personal force of God? And it is for this we 
perish. It is this personal force, this Holy 
Spirit, whereof our nerves are scant. 

Our lives are made up of so many strange, 
incongruous fragments. We gather ourselves 
in from the four corners of the world. George 
MacDonald's catechism of babyhood is not 
astray, after all : 

"Where did you come from, baby dear? 
Out of the everywhere into here. 
Where did you get those eyes so blue? 
Out of the sky as I came through." 

So we pick ourselves up along the way. We 
are not a chip off the old block, as we used to 

93 



Unto Heights Heroic 

say. We are chips off a good many blocks. 
Some are old and some are new; some of the 
street and some of the schools; some of the 
market and some of the home. 

And the real problem of life is to achieve per- 
sonal unity; to find the spiritual bond that will 
bind all the fragments into one magnificent and 
masterly whole. Personalize every chip. Make 
every part throb with personal force. 

There are two movements in life: one the 
gathering in, the individualizing; the other the 
sending out, the personalizing. What comes in 
never goes back the same: what comes in as 
earth, air, sun, and dew returns in leaf, bud, and 
blossom. So into our life come the fragments 
to be sent back again, but never the same. 
They are to be personalized; tinged by the soul; 
sent back throbbing with personal force, with 
the Spirit of God. 

Our life is gathered into the individual to be 
returned again in the universal, in the gospel 
for all men. Here is a pansy, gathering itself 
into certain colors and forms. What does it 
return ? Not its individuality, not its color, not 
Its form ; but something more common, and yet 
more precious : beauty and fragrance, a gospel 
for all men. And here is a young man fresh 

94 



The Heart of the Vision 

from the schools with his medal, his diploma, 
his degree. What can he do with them ? Can 
he take the medal and pierce it through and 
through with his personal force till he has 
personalized it? — transmuted it into coin that 
enriches the souls of men ? Can he rise to the 
level of a prince and strew his way with the 
largess of personal powers ? 

Then what of his diploma, this dusty old 
parchment! Can he take this document and 
make it live again, as the genius takes some 
ancient tale and breathes into it new life — 
weaves his personality through and through it 
till it throbs with an undying power ? Can he 
take this dry parchment and weave his person- 
ality through and through it — make it tell the 
great story of the cross ? 

Then he has been graduated to a certain de- 
gree. He has been graduated ; now as he steps 
down into the world what is to be his gradua- 
ting power, his personal force? Will he be able 
to graduate bootblacks, newsboys, and street 
arabs into manhood ? Will he have the power 
to graduate the hopeless into hope, the weak 
into strength, the foolish into wisdom, and the 
bad into good ? 

What is his personal force? This is the 
95 



Unto Heights Heroic 

supreme question of life, that which makes the 
difference between success and faikire. This is 
the supreme factor in the nation's Hfe, that by 
w^hich she rises into divine vigor. This is the 
supreme factor in human history, that by which 
she climbs the rugged heights of progress. 

The woman of Samaria came to the well a 
mere drawer of water. She went out from the 
presence of Christ an exhaustless fountain 
springing up into everlasting life. It is on the 
flood tide of personalities that history is lifted 
through the ages. 

96 



HISTORY 
The Kiss of Destiny 



(7) 



''Once to every man and nation comes a moment to 
decide." — Lowell 

*'But the unit of the visit, 

The encounter of the wise — 
Say what other meter is it 

Than the meeting of the eyes ?" 

— Emerson. 

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies." 
— Carlyle. 



THE KISS OF DESTINY 

** Kiss the Son."— Psa. ii, 12. 

This psalm is a temple of history built by the 
genius of a poet; just such a temple as such a 
genius could build out of any modern city. 

In the outer court the human is rampant, 
scheming, jostling, urging, building its splen- 
did vanities; while in the very midst of the 
surging crowd, like a seething volcano, human 
passion chafes against every divine restraint. 
The wild human cry rises above the uproar of 
the jostling crowd : "Let us break their bands 
asunder/' 

Pass through this outer court into the next 
and the scene is changed. The tumult of the 
human gives place to the calm of God. There 
is a throne, there is order, there is life. On the 
throne is a King, and on his lips an edict : "Ask 
of me, and I will give you the nations" — God 
giving the world to his Son. 

In the outer court all is confusion, all is fer- 
mentation. In the inner court the builders are 
at work, the structure is growing. 

But there is yet another court, still more in- 
terior, throbbing with the life and love and 

L.o?C. ^ 



Unto Heights Heroic 

beauty of the Son of God; life's holy of holies, 
where the whole destiny of man is reduced to 
one sentence: ''Kiss the Son." ''Give your 
allegiance to him/' All life, all history, hangs 
upon this individual act. 

In the outer court we get such a view as we 
would get were we to lift the roofs and look 
down into some modern hells. Indeed, we need 
not go so deep, for what seems a maddening 
maze has much human method underneath. 

Suppose we lift the roof from the political 
wigwam, the senate chamber, and the market 
place; from the council chamber of kings and 
theologians and thinkers. We shall find at 
least no placid lake. True, we are in the pres- 
ence of thought. The kings are taking council, 
the people are meditating, but the product is 
vanity. 

What an amount of thinking, scheming, 
planning, we do, all the way from kings down 
to peasants ! What brains we wear out ! What 
logic we weary in concocting systems that burst 
like a bubble ! If the time we spend in schem- 
ing vanities were taken from our life what 
would be left ? 

We work and dig and delve and twist like the 
old deacon at his "one hoss shay" that was to 

100 



The Kiss of Destiny 

last forever. For, he said, since things break in 
the weakest spot, make one part as strong as the 
other and it never can break. For logic is logic. 
And behold it went down in a lump, broke like 
a bubble. 

So men have wrought at many a ''shay" — 
creeds, doctrines, systems. They have put in 
their lifeblood, gone to the stake; made them 
to last forever — eternal, they call them. Yet 
we won't have them to-day. They are stowed 
in the lumber room of modern thought. ''Our 
little systems have their day." 

Still, there is a value in all this vanity build- 
ing. The blowing of a bubble expands the 
lungs, and the lungs are worth more than the 
bubble. And the blowing of intellectual bubbles 
expands the brain, yes, the soul, and that is the 
main thing. For men are more than systems. 

There is much in the old man's reply in Alice 
in Wonderland. When asked how he could 
manage to eat such hard things considering 
his age — 

** 'In my youth,' said the father, 
'I took to the law, 
And argued each case with my wife. 
And the muscular strength it gave to my jaw 
Has lasted the rest of my life.' " 
lOI 



Unto Heights Heroic 

The spiritual strength that has come to the 
soul, the larger man, that is the supreme value. 
Yet every human system takes us a certain dis- 
tance. We must have them, though they are 
not through lines. The only through line is the 
great living way of God. 

But in this outer court there is another voice 
not from the council chamber but from the 
mob : ^'Let us break their bands." This is the 
revolt of passions, the vortex of democracy. 

We believe in our democratic creeds, yet it 
takes much faith to stand the strain. What a 
seething world lies about us ! What a breaking 
of cords ! New wine breaking the old bottles, 
poor wine too. 

^'Laissez faire'' is the cry. Forms are broken, 
boundaries ignored, rights overrun. Things 
are dissolved in the fervent heat of the times. 
Life is trying its latent energies with every 
latest fad. No book, no day, no ancient law is 
strong enough to hold, curb, control this mod- 
ern giant of democracy. So it seems, at least. 
And it would be folly to attempt an immediate 
special, far-reaching remedy; to say what ought 
to be done to put the world soberly on its feet; 
to suggest some coup d'etat. 

We simply look out upon a scene of fer- 

102 



The Kiss of Destiny 

mentation. We must take it as it is. But if 
fermentation be the true word we are most 
fortunate; for if the world be in a ferment 
something must be brewing. What is it? 
What is brewing below the surface? What 
shall we find in the inner court ? 

This psalm is no mere poem. The author 
goes deeper than the surface. He commands 
the X-rays of inspiration and pierces the 
troubled exterior. He brings us into the pres- 
ence of a throne. God's throne is out of sight, 
beneath the people, for he would make every 
man king. His empire is ruled from the deep 
and silent heart of things. His courtiers, his 
couriers, his armies wear an invisible livery. 
The world has a trumpet voice, God speaks in 
whispers. Crime cries itself hoarse, goodness 
works with its mouth shut. The news, the 
strange, the abnormal, makes much ado speed- 
ing its telegraphic way through the world. But 
the good news is dispatched through the invisi- 
ble telegraphy of God. 

God's builders are out of sight. God's throne 
is at the heart of the wild world. On it sits his 
Son, and to him he is slowly giving the nations. 
''He shall break them like a potter's vessel." 
The old vessels that held the vanities and pas- 

103 



Unto Heights Heroic 

sions o£ earth, vessels of wrath — these are 
being broken and shaped again on the vvheel of 
God for truth divine and the passion of the 
cross. 

But to enter more closely into the divine 
council. We have seen how our thought struc- 
tures collapse. This is equally true of all 
human structures: families, tribes, castes, na- 
tions. No human art or artifice can save them 
from the inevitable. 

The decay of the favored classes in all ages is 
one of the facts of history. And the philosopher 
who once sought the elixir of life for the indi- 
vidual is to-day seeking the same elixir for the 
clan, class, or race. Why those upon whom the 
greatest advantages have been bestowed should 
decline is the problem. The best and most com- 
prehensive answer given is perhaps this : ''That 
man is made for progress through struggle. 
When, therefore, the object for which we strive 
is attained, when the top is reached, when the 
boundary of social distinction is touched, when 
we have reached the ranks of the most favored 
and cease to struggle, then we begin to recede, 
decay, perish." What, therefore, we need is 
some condition that will put us under the strain 
of an immortal strife. 

104 



The Kiss of Destiny 

Now, when the Son sets his throne down in 
the world such a struggle begins, a new strug- 
gle. Take our own life : we came to him striv- 
ing to find something, to get something; we 
found him, when, behold, the struggle is re- 
versed. Now the effort is to give, to speak, to 
express. We came to draw water from the 
well ; the struggle was to bring it from the cool, 
living depths. Now we go out a well in our- 
self, striving to give — ''a fountain springing up 
unto everlasting life." We come with the 
human want, we go forth with the divine 
fullness. 

Henceforth we are under the law of supply 
and demand. We hear again and again from 
the divine-human traveler, ^^Give me to drink." 
This, on every side, is the cry of our eager, 
restless, wayward humanity, ''Give me to 
drink." This is the cry of the soul, with its 
myriad wants. Give what? Give all you are, 
the best you are. Give books, give art, give 
knowledge, give conditions, give life, give God. 
The demand is immortal, and so is the supply. 
The struggle is divine, is altruistic. 

A recent writer has said that all human prog- 
ress is made by a constant replenishing from a 
fund of altniistic feeling. This is very true, 

105 



Unto Heights Heroic 

but where is the fund deposited? Have we 
access to the bank? On this question philoso- 
phy is vague, but our psalm is definite. ''Kiss 
the Son." Give him your allegiance. History 
in its last analysis is individual. A world of 
men, of free moral agents, must always move 
by units. ''Kiss the Son." All the world re- 
volves around this personal center. Here is the 
depository of the altruistic feeling by which 
the world moves. 

Without depreciating questions of national 
breadth with which the air is always charged — 
questions great and grave — let us not forget 
that this one question is world-wide, is uni- 
versal; that upon it hinges all human progress 
— this individual relation of man to the supreme 
Hero of human destiny. 

No clan, class, or nation can ever be saved by 
a readjustment of social conditions. No meas- 
uring up to the conventional standards about 
us is sufficient. The call is to heroism, nothing 
less. "Not conformed to this world, but trans- 
formed by the renewing," the divine renewing. 

If, as social students tell us, the aristocracy 
of Europe, or, indeed, of any other country, 
be decaying, this, and this alone, is the elixir 
with which to restore their depleted life. 

io6 



The Kiss of Destiny 

When a man kisses the Son, when there is 
an interchange of eyes, an interflow of soul, a 
hero is born. He is stung with a divine am- 
bition — the ambition to give himself, to pour 
out his life. The immortal possibility of a 
personality is open to the world. This is the 
world's true leadership. 

*'Kiss the Son." This in the present tense. 
Now is the crisis of life. This is forever true. 
The greatest mistake of our thinking has al- 
ways been to put God too far back, leaving the 
world a sort of cosmic machine grinding out 
its mechanical career; or else to put God too 
far forward, leaving the world a sort of chaotic 
concourse striving in vain to overtake its 
Maker. 

Missing the present God has always been 
the failure of life. This was the failure of 
the Hebrew people. On that memorable day, 
that looked so like other days, yet was full of 
God, as he walked in their midst they were 
still saying, ''God has been here, and he 
will come again." But they failed, utterly 
failed, to grasp the great fact of his presence 
here and now. 

"And the choice went by forever 
'Twixt the darkness and that light." 
107 



Unto Heights Heroic 

Have we not learned from the whole teach- 
ing of Revelation, now so strongly reaffirmed 
by science, that we are walking in a world over- 
flowing with God? that every moment, every 
hour, every day is flooded with the divine Pres- 
ence ? and that this is the real "tide which, taken 
at its flood," leads on to destiny? Therefore, 
*'Kiss the Son." 'To-day, if ye will hear his 
voice." If the heroic call has come awake, arise, 
go forth, for it is the voice of the divine Hero. 

io8 



LIFE 

TKe Voices 



'Tike an -^Eolian harp that wakes 

No certain air, but overtakes 

Far thought with music that it makes: 

"Such seemed the w^hisper at my side: 
'What is it thou knowest, sv/eet voice?' 1 cried. 
*A hidden hope,' the voice replied, 

"So heavenly-toned, that in that hour 
From out my sullen heart a power 
Broke, like the rainbow from the showier, 

''To feel, although no tongue can prove. 
That every cloud, that spreads above 
And veileth love, itself is love." 

"A still small voice spake unto me, 
*Thou art so full of misery. 
Were it not better not to be?' 

"Then to the still small voice I said: 
'Let me not cast in endless shade 
What is so wonderfully made. 

" 'Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 

No life that breathes with human breath 

Has ever truly longed for death. 

" ' 'Tis life v/hereof our nerves are scant — 
O life, not death, for which we pant : 
More life and fuller, that I want.' 

"A second voice was at mine ear, 

A little whisper silver-clear, 

A murmur, 'Be of better cheer.' " 



THE VOICES 

*• The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness." — Isa. xl, 3. 

For many years the literary merit as well 
as spiritual power of these Isaiahan chapters, 
from the fortieth on, has been steadily growing 
upon the minds of readers. A quarter of 
a century ago Matthew Arnold put them into 
book form, following the authorized text, 
with a very strongly appreciative preface. 
Led on by the literary charm, he found 
his way into the deeper spiritual significance 
of the scripture. 

It is always the mission of literature to carry 
a message of life, a message for the heart. This 
whole scripture is a message from the heart of 
God to the heart of man. Indeed, the passage 
generally translated, ''Speak ye comfortably to 
Jerusalem," is better rendered, "Speak ye to 
the heart of Jerusalem.'' 

Science and philosophy have no heart mes- 
sage. It takes literature to reach the heart. 
For literature is born of the heart. It utters the 
unutterable. It is the outburst of personality. 
When literature adopts the finer, subtler forms 
of expression it is no affectation, but a serious 

III 



Unto Heights Heroic 

attempt to get from one heart to another; to 
utter the highest, hoHest truth of the soul. 

It is hard to express the deepest things in 
us. Lyman Beecher used to say, 'If I could 
play all that I hear inside of me I could beat 
Paganini.'' And again, '1 am sick because 
I cannot reveal the feelings of my heart." 
Great souls speak from compulsion. They 
speak under pressure of the heart, and from 
the heart to the heart. 

"When some wild emotion 
Strikes the ocean 
Of the poet's soul, ere long 
From each rocky cave and fastness 
In its vastness 
Floats the fragment of a song." 

And this Bible, the literature of God, the out- 
flow of the divine personality, clad in every 
possible form, rushes with spiritual power from 
the heart of God to the heart of man — from 
heart to heart. Here in these chapters of 
Isaiah, where the spirit of God burns into a 
flame of redeeming love, it naturally takes on 
its noblest literary form. Every art of expres- 
sion lends itself to the divine purpose. Rhap- 
sody and drama, poetry and pleading, oratory 
and argument, blending in spiritual unity and 

1X2 



The Voices 

purpose, press into the heart of man with life — 
life larger, nobler, diviner. 

There is first the voice scene. Voices are 
speeding across the desert. Life, real life, that 
begins where mere existence leaves off, begins 
with a voice; not a word well defined and 
elaborated into a creed, but just a voice — some 
one calling, we hardly know as yet whither. 
All great lives have heard voices — Moses and 
Abraham, Samuel and Isaiah, John, Luther, 
and Mazzini. 

The voice of life may at least be defined thus 
far : It calls us to be something, or, better, some 
one; to distinguish or differentiate ourselves; 
to come out and be separate; to be more than a 
conventional automaton; to be ourself; to be 
something that is I, and not a part of the 
crowd; to be an individual. This ambition 
prompts the small boy to show off; to differ- 
entiate himself from the company; the young 
fellows to break over conventional boundaries 
and shock people; and literary geniuses some- 
times to revolt against the existing order of 
things. 

There is, however, a true distinction, a true 
individualizing of life. It is not by doing some- 
thing eccentric, not by shocking the world, nor 
(8) 113 



UxTO Heights Heroic 

by revolting against tl:e existing order: not to 
be different, but better; not in a new species, 
but an improvement on the old, earning life a 
step further along the main way. "Prepare ye 
the way of the Lord:" that man away ahead 
cutting out the brush, picking out the stones, 
leveling down the mountains, filling up the 
valleys, turning the wilderness of man into the 
highway of God. 

This is the true call, the real distinction of 
life — glorifying the commonplaces. Some 
books we love, not because the author has done 
something strange, wild, eccentric, but because 
he has taken us into some commonplace home 
of poverty and through the dull light and tear- 
stained faces has revealed the glory of a himian 
heart lit with the light of God. He glorifies 
the commonplaces. He is on ahead. This is 
true distinction, real individuality'. 

Moses distinguished himself by going on 
ahead of his people. Sometimes they did not 
know where he was. He was quite out of sight. 
He. too, glorified the commonplaces with those 
great first principles of life, preparing the way 
of God. 

Sometimes trtie distinction becomes degen- 
erate. A man distinguishes himself, and his 

114 



The Voices 

grandchildren are content to rest upon his 
laurels. This is the birth of caste. Spirit gives 
place to form. Abraham rose far above his age 
in fellowship with God. But the best his 
descendants could say for themselves was that 
they were his children. 

Moses discovered the first principles of life, 
but how soon they were turned for caste pur- 
poses into a thousand petty rules ! Every true 
revival is a passing on into spiritual distinction. 
Afterward comes the period of rules, religious 
castes, ecclesiastical machinery. These two 
phases of life are forever at loggerheads. 
Throughout the Bible they run counter: life 
sliding dow^n into caste, petty, narrow, cruel; 
and life struggling upward, strong, broad, 
spiritual. 

What a picture of these counter currents we 
have in Job's life! Around him are his con- 
ventional ultra-orthodox friends, wiser than 
the Almighty. They weigh the man in their 
little scales of human logic as they talk of what 
ought to be, what must be, and what cannot be. 
Meantime Job is struggling, groping, living his 
way, following the voices beyond all boundaries 
and conclusions, till out of sight of his friends 
on the unseen heights of God he finally cries, 

115 



Unto Heights Heroic 

*1 know that my Redeemer liveth/' This is 
the outburst of spiritual experience, the shout 
of victory, the thrill of individual life. 

But life is not under the simple sway of one 
clear voice. There are many voices — many and 
discordant. We have to find our way through 
the voices. One voice is heard calling across 
the desert to another, saying, 'Take up the 
message and carry it forward. Cry !'' But the 
other voice calls back, ''What shall I cry? 
What is the use of crying?" "The grass 
withereth, the flower fadeth; and the people 
are grass." 

This is the voice of despair. We rush down 
into the w^orld to the blooming flower. "A 
thing of beauty is a joy forever." Nay; we 
pluck it, and, behold, to-morrow it is faded and 
gone. Such is life. 

"The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, 
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows 

brown and sear. 
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves 

lie dead ; 
They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit's 

tread/' 

The poets are prone to these pessimistic 
moods. Shelley, Schiller, and Byron have sung 
this despair. They have answered back to the 

1x6 



The Voices 

voice of hope, ^'What shall we cry? — the grass 
withereth, the flower fadeth." 

We have tried to escape this pessimistic 
voice in two directions. One has been to 
plunge into the world. ^'Eat, drink, for to- 
morrow you die.'' Make the most of the world 
while it is going, which is not always making 
the best of it. The other is to turn away from 
the fading, disappointing world : to lose sight 
of this world, to despise it; to live in the 
thought of another world. Both are fruitless 
and false ways to escape. 

But there is another way. The voice of 
despair dies out, and another voice takes up the 
cry. Yes, he repeats, ^The grass withereth, the 
flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall 
stand forever." 

There is something that never fades, never 

withers — the word of God. Where is it ? Not 

in some other world, but in this. Go back to 

the flower: there is something even in the 

flower that never dies. 

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

The flower may fade, but its message will live 
forever. 

Men are not doubters, despairers, because 
117 



UxTo Heights Heroic 

they think deeply, but because they do not think 
deeply enough. They do not get through to 
the sap, the heart, where the eternals live and 
flow. They stop in the foliage, and the foliage 
withers and dies. The wisest thinking is just 
the art of connecting the foliage with the per- 
ennial sap of eternity. 

The word of God is in the flower, yes, in the 
grass, in all the commonplaces of life, if we can 
but find it. The sheep gets the best out of the 
grass by nipping it, but we do not. It is not 
by ownership, but by fellowship, that we get 
the best things of life. 'We must linger around 
and listen for the word. Xot by owning the 
flowers, but by associating with them. If we 
have lost faith in men it may be because we 
have tried to pluck them, possess them, rather 
than associate with them, listening for the 
divine message they bring, consciously or un- 
consciously. It is not necessary to be million- 
aires, but woe to the man who ceases to be a 
fellow. 

"All things must die: 
The stream will cease to flow; 
The wind will cease to blow ; 
The clouds will cease to fleet; 
The heart will cease to beat ; 
For all things must die." 
1x8 



The Voices 

Yet dying, like Christ on Calvary, they leave 
behind their message from God. You will re- 
member how ''Blue Bird" was reclaimed from 
her reckless life to God and his service by a 
flower thrust into her hand by a woman. It 
faded, but in dying spoke — spoke to her heart, 
''gave thoughts that lie too deep for tears." 

But another voice is now heard, a voice that 
grows wild with enthusiasm, calling upon Zion 
to take up the message: "O Jerusalem, that 
bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with 
strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the 
cities of Judah, Behold your God !" 

"Behold your God!" Here is something 
even better than the "word." It is God him- 
self; the gospel of the Presence — richer than all 
words. There is a gospel of the Presence. 

This man speaks fluently and logically. We 
listen with admiration, and wonder if it is true. 
This other man seems a pauper in words, but 
he comes to us with a presence that convinces 
at sight. He speaks with authority. This phi- 
losopher whom we sought in our trouble mud- 
dled us with his wisdom. This wise man who 
said almost nothing but seemed to bring our 
tangle into the light of his presence sent us out 
a clearer-headed and stronger-hearted man. 
119 



Unto Heights Heroic 

It is the Presence that saves — the real Pres- 
ence. The Bible is not simply a message from 
God, but a revelation of God. It takes us into 
his presence, deeper and deeper. It is not the 
word simply, clear-cut, cold, lifeless. It is the 
word while he is yet speaking; his breath, his 
life, his Spirit is in it. This is the life power 
of the book. 

We live deeper than flowers, deeper than 
words — we live in experiences; in the secret 
places of life beyond the word — deeper, much 
deeper, where speech removes its shoes for rev- 
erence and thought hangs furled; where the 
mother waits, where the father prays, where the 
young man finds the meaning of his soul and 
girds himself for life — in the presence of God. 

This IS the democracy, this the liberty, this 
the range of life — that it is rooted in an experi- 
ence. It is an experience between two persons, 
God and me. This is life. 

"All I know of a certain star 

Is, it can throw (like an angled spar) 

Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue ; 

Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, 

My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 

Then it stopped like a bird; like a flower hangs furled: 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 

What matter to me if their star is a world? 

Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it." 

I20 




LIFE 
TKe Mission 



"Life is not an idle ore, 
But iron dug from central gloom 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipped in baths of hissing tears. 
And battered with the shocks of doom, 
To shape and use." — Tennyson, 

"Be sure that God 
Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart." 

— Browning. 

"God is the author, men are only the players. These 
grand pieces which are played upon earth have been 
composed in heaven." — Balzac, 



THE MISSION 

" But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; they 
shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not be weary ; 
and they shall walk, and not faint." — Isa. xl, 31. 

The voices left us in the presence of God — 
life an experience. The evolution of this ex- 
perience into life's mission occupies the suc- 
ceeding chapters. True, there is an almost per- 
plexing variety of thought, form, and action 
flashing from this scripture, yet through it all 
may be traced the unfolding of one purpose. 

The voices were idealistic ; these chapters are 
realistic. We have passed from the idyllic 
shepherd scene into the heart of a great city. 
Getting out of Babylon is the problem; not a 
problem in history, but in life. There is history 
in it. Cyrus is matched against Babylon. 
There is the clash of arms, and the city falls. 
But, strange to say, there arises above the con- 
quered city not the form of Cyrus, but of Israel 
— a new Israel waking and rising slowly to the 
great purpose of God and the great mission of 
life. 

It is more than a rescue. We sometimes stop 
with that idea of salvation, but God never does. 
Israel was a wreck, but God treats her rather as 

123 



Unto Heights Heroic 

a magnificent possibility. This is his treatment 
of all human wrecks; he never forgets that he is 
preeminently a builder and maker of men. The 
brand plucked from the burning never tells the 
whole story of salvation. Longfellow has a 
little poem of an artist w^io, sitting one day by 
the fire, snatched a brand from the hearth, then 
finally carved it into a work of art. God 
plucked Israel from the burning — to carve, to 
bring out the true life, the divine purpose, the 
likeness of God, that God through him might 
''break into glory.'' And this work, this fine 
art of God, is what we have in these chapters 
of Isaiah, wrought out through his presence — 
the thought of this passage — 'They that wait 
upon the Lord.'' 

It was an awful change for those people to 
be taken up from the simple shepherd life and 
dropped into the heart of the world's civiliza- 
tion. A boy taken from a country home and 
dropped into a city realizes for the first time 
how big the world is, how^ overwhelming is 
man — these streets throbbing with commerce, 
these buildings shutting out the sky, this whir 
of factories, this babel of voices. Why! God 
in the country hardly seems equal to man in the 
city. He feels, like the Israelite, that his ways 

124 



The Mission 

are hidden from the God of the old meeting- 
house on the hill — that God has lost track of 
him. 

And we are always passing through this ex- 
perience. We are being dropped from an age 
of simplicity into an age of complexity and per- 
plexity — from the little province into the 
metropolis; from the hill country into Babylon. 
Suddenly the world is upon us so big, so ruth- 
less, so irreverent. Science has pushed the old 
boundaries in upon the country of God. Com- 
merce has run her tracks through the ancient 
sanctuaries. The world is rushing on with 
such speed that we have no chance to "possess 
our souls in patience.'' We are caught in the 
whirl of thought, in the torrent of things. We 
are being made in spite of ourselves — factory- 
made in the mill of modern civilization. And 
our soul is oozing from us through hoe and 
chisel, through pen and pencil, through science, 
commerce, and art. 

To a people in such straits came the prophet 
with a message. What was it? Just this: 
Your world is not too big, but your idea of God 
is too little. The transcendency of God. You 
have thought of him as the God of the shepherd 
land. But let man enlarge his world, let him 

125 



Unto Heights Heroic 

widen the circles beyond all former thought; 
still it is ^'God who sitteth upon the last circle." 

Some prophets to-day take us through the al- 
most unending stages of evolution, to bring us 
at last face to face with the Almighty sitting 
upon the ultimate circle. All this great new 
land is still God's country, not man's. And the 
length and breadth of it, and the wonderfulness 
of the exploration, have only given us a nobler 
idea of God. And from this must be born a 
nobler idea of man. 

When your heart beats low from too much 
world, when you need a heavenly tonic, turn to 
this fortieth chapter of Isaiah. The transcend- 
ency of God shines through every word : ^'Hast 
thou not known ? hast thou not heard, that the 
everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the 
ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is 
weary? . . . Hegivethpower to the faint; and 
to them that have no might he increaseth 
strength. Even the youths shall faint and be 
weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: 
but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew 
their strength; they shall mount up with wings 
as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and 
they shall walk, and not faint." 

From the transcendency of God is born the 
126 



The Mission 

transcendency of man. The man who waits 
upon God is touched and tinged with the su- 
premacy of God. To him the world is the path- 
way of the soul — the great highway of God 
where everything bows to the mastery of man, 
where everything is hands and feet and wings 
for the soul. A favorite thought of the 
prophet, this sovereignty of the soul that waits 
upon God. The rivers cannot overflow him. 
For him the trees break into song. At his ap- 
proach the desert blossoms as a rose, and the 
stagnant pools are turned into living fountains. 

And even more than this, along this highway 
of the soul not only does the earth wait upon 
God's courtier, but the heavens too. This is the 
thought of the prophet. All along the way the 
heavens are bursting with songs. There are 
choirs invisible. Israel sings and the watch- 
men on the walls sing. ^'The heavens are filled" 
— not with commerce, but with song. 

There is a picture by Breton, a good supple- 
ment for "The Man with the Hoe." A peasant 
girl, bareheaded, barefooted, sickle in hand, is 
going forth to her toil. Suddenly a lark breaks 
into song above her. She stops, her head 
thrown back, her lips apart, her face aglow, her 
eye beaming. For the moment she has forgot- 

127 



Unto Heights Heroic 

ten the world, "all time and toil and care.'' 
This is the divine remedy for a material age, 
for an aggressive world — not the entire aboli- 
tion of the hoe and the sickle, but more larks 
above; not less earth, but more sky; songs that 
inspire, ideals that lift, standards that are 
divine. "They that wait upon the Lord shall 
renew their strength." 

But waiting upon God is more than an inspi- 
ration; it is a criticism of life. God is the su- 
preme critic. Life is moral: therefore is always 
on trial, always at the judgment bar of God. 
Judgment is not simply a far-off event, it is a 
process forever going on. And this ver}^ 
thought runs through these chapters. The na- 
tions are in the court of God, are on trial before 
him. 

This is the deepest current of history in all 
ages. It is also the deepest current of life. We 
live by judgment. The soul through which the 
judgments of God are not always sweeping is 
dead. We live by the searching light of God. 
When you lift a stone in the field the beetles 
rush to cover, because they love darkness rather 
than light. So God dispels the moral beetles of 
the soul by pouring in the light, new light, 
stronger and whiter. 

128 



The Mission 

Every day we are called to stand in some 
new light. The fatal charge against the Jews 
was not that they were false to the old light, but 
that they would not receive the new. This is 
the soul's fatality, that the new light comes and 
we refuse the test, the trial. Real life, growing, 
expanding, is forever passing from judgment 
hall to judgment hall. 

Then judgment is also in events, the tests of 
life. His fan is in his hand, and we are in the 
fan. And as the farmer tosses wheat and chaff 
into the air to be caught and separated by a 
blast of wand, so God tosses the soul in the ex- 
periences of life. Every toss into prominence 
is a test, a trial. A new wind catches us and 
there is less chaff. God is looking for the 
wheat. ''Bringing forth judgment unto truth." 
Not truth in the abstract, not a creed, but truth 
in the head and heart, in the hands and feet, 
truth all alive. 

So judgment sweeps through the soul. The 
selfish thought is doomed. The unholy purpose 
is condemned. The lust is cast into hell. The 
idols of earth perish, and the ideals of heaven 
are born. Babylon falls, and the servant of 
God rises in her place. 

This is election or selection according to 
(9) 129 



Unto Heights Heroic 

quality. We are elected if we pass muster, if 
we are equal to the trial, if we can stand the 
test, if we can measure up. But measure up to 
what? To the purpose of God in us. This is 
the great appeal of life, the purpose of God 
sweeping dow^n through the ages. This is the 
logic of the Bible, this the great theme of Paul, 
this the awakening thought of our prophet. 
''Jacob, I have called thee." 'Israel, I have 
chosen thee." 'T have taken hold of thee from 
the ends of the earth,'' away back in Abraham. 

The modern doctrine of heredity is fore- 
stalled by the prophet and made to serve a noble 
end, to lift life into larger meaning. Life is no 
little circle, no side issue, no spider's w^eb in the 
corner for purposes of spoil. Life is a succes- 
sion of princes — that is, if we grasp it as it lies 
in the purpose of God. We are called to stand 
in a noble succession. Grasping this thought is 
life's power, failing it is life's defeat. 

We are heirs if we only knew it. One day in 
a western village an old Indian was found beg- 
ging through the streets. Suspended from his 
neck was a charm; when opened it was found 
to contain a deed from the government for a 
large tract of land. So our life holds deeds, 
legacies, birthrights that we have never 

130 



The Mission 

claimed. We go a begging when we might be 
princes. We are overwhelmed, overrun, 
swamped by the world. We live, yet not we, 
but the world liveth in us, when, were we to 
rise to the purpose of God in us, to the purpose 
of God revealed through the Prince of Life, we 
should pass from beggardom to princedom. 
We should then rise to that heroic scripture 
that brings the world into homage to the soul : 
''I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and 
the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son 
of God." 

But, more definitely, what is the purpose of 
God in Israel? What is her mission? A 
strange one, very strange. A mission of light : 
"Thou shalt be a light to the nations.'' A mis- 
sion of words : 'Thou shalt succor the weary 
with words.'' A mission of gentleness: *'A 
bruised reed shall he not break." A mission of 
silence: ''He shall not lift up his voice in the 
street." 

What is all this but the mission of the soul, 
the soul forces — the mission of what we are to 
the world, of what we are poured forth in 
words, deeds, and life? 

But the practical question arises, how to 
achieve this mission, how to unfold the soul, 

131 



Unto Heights Heroic 

how to reveal ourself. This is really the most 
difficult question in life. We are conscious of 
something within, but it is a mystery; a vague 
force pushing and urging, we know not 
whither. There is no clear-cut scripture of 
God's purpose within us. 

We are like a boy who feels the life of man- 
hood within him, restless, vague, impetuous, 
and he knows not what to do with it. One day 
on a stagecoach I watched such a boy for half 
an hour. In that time he ate some bananas, and 
sat on some peaches; inadvertently wiped his 
feet on an old gentleman who sat near; swung 
by a strap over the wheels when we were going 
down hill; and finally put on the brake when we 
were going up. 

How like the vague and restless life of our 
own soul ! Active, but foolishly and disastrously 
active. The brakes on uphill, and off downhill. 
Active, but no definite unfolding of the inner 
purpose. Rather, a wasting of that purpose; 
bartering the soul for success, selling thoughts 
for money, peddling conscience for fame, sur- 
rendering character for popularity — ''losing 
the soul to gain the world.'' 

The severest test of life is, ''To thine own 
self be true." Still the question remains, How ? 

132 



The Mission 

How can I be true to my own soul ? How can 
I stand by my own wares? How can I have 
faith in my own powers? And the answer 
comes again from the passage, *They that wait 
upon the Lord." 

The flower unfolds its divine purpose in the 
presence of the sun, and the soul in the presence 
of God. 

*'God's plans like lilies pure and white unfold: 
We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart; 
Time will reveal the calyxes of gold." 

^33 



LIFE 
THe Hero 



*'Our own best and noblest life, our own greatest 
heroism, interprets for us God's love." — Abbott. 

'The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
So the All-great were the All-loving, too— 
So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee with myself to love. 
And thou must love me who have died for thee !' " 

— Browning, 



THE HERO 

** Behold, my servant shall prosper." — Isa. lii, 13. 

•* He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied."— Isa. 
liii, XX. 

Our prophet now takes us still deeper into 
the mysteries of life. In the last chapter we 
found life unfolding in God's presence — un- 
folding God's purpose within us, the mission of 
what we are to the world. 

It was a study of life from the standpoint of 
man. Now the prophet takes us within the veil 
— to the standpoint of God, to a revelation of 
the mysteries of life, to the dynamics of the 
soul. ''My servant shall prosper." ''He shall 
see of the travail of his soul, and shall be 
satisfied." 

Life from God's standpoint is always a mas- 
tery for higher ends, an incessant travail for 
new and finer issues. The elements may swirl 
around a rock and pass on; but when they touch 
a living tree they are caught and held and 
turned to nobler things. Earth, air, and dew 
return in leaf, bud, and blossom. 

A brook may gather the debris of a hundred 
cottages and sweep them into an eddy, there to 
play out their meaningless existence. But a boy 

137 



Unto Heights Heroic 

will gather the debris of one cottage, screws, 
nails, sticks, etc., grasp them, turn upon them 
the force of his individuality; and return them 
to the world with a new and higher meaning — 
a miniature house, barn, or mill. With the boy 
there is more than a battle with sticks. There 
is an actual travail of soul to express himself 
in sticks, screws, and nails. Every power of 
the soul is taxed — insight, sympathy, will. 
That little mill with its wabbling wheels could 
tell a strange and pathetic story of the travail 
of a boy's soul. 

Or, again, there is that piece of machinery — 
the product of mature skill — that runs so 
rhythmically and silently that one might think 
it made in heaven and dropped into this dis- 
cordant earth. It, too, has its story deeper than 
the heart of the mountain, the flame of the 
forge, or the skill of the workman; a story that 
leads into the depths of the inventor's soul; 
into days and nights of poverty and toil, of 
hardship and disappointment, of weary waiting 
and hard working; a travail of soul known only 
to one man and his God, as he wrestles with 
principles that baffle, with steel that resists, 
with ideals that elude. 

And that snatch of the poet's song, that 
138 



The Hero 

flutters like an angel into our heart, is no handi- 
work of technique. It, too, is a child of the 

soul. 

"Let us, then, be up and doing. 
With a heart for any fate." 

What depths of life are back of such a sen- 
tence! What sorrows and heartaches, what 
vigils and toil, before the poet could write such 
words. Thrust your rapier into them, as Mrs. 
Browning suggests, and you will find blood 
upon it. 

This is the great secret of the masters; this 
their only divinity; this their only genius. 
Carlyle says of Shakespeare : 'It seems to me 
a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat 
like a bird on the bough and sang forth free 
and offhand. Doubt not he had his own sor- 
rows. How could a man travel forward from 
rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing 
and not fall in with sorrows by the way ?'' 

It is by sheer travail of the soul, the age-long 
travail of the human soul, that all constitutions, 
inventions, poems, and pictures are born into 
this world. Indeed, was it not in such travail 
of the Infinite Soul that the world itself was 
born ? Is not this the real creative power ? Is 
it not the genius of God ? 

139 



Unto Heights Heroic 

We have too often held the notion that God 
makes worlds as a boy blows bubbles; that all 
these precious things of earth and the soul cost 
him nothing. A most unworthy thought of 
God. As one has truly said, *'As long as we 
conceive him as bestowing blessings upon us 
out of his infinite fullness, but at no real cost to 
himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our 
race." 

If things are true and beautiful and good it 
is because so much of the Eternal Soul has gone 
into them; just as the soul of the artist goes 
into a picture — the only thing that makes it a 
real picture. The flowers you bring into the 
sick room are touched into life by the Infinite 
love. They are expressions of the divine 
passion, tokens of the divine sympathy and 
thoughtfulness. If a landscape lifts the soul 
it is because there is soul in it; for it takes a 
soul to move a soul. 

When we read, ^^\nd the Spirit of God 
moved upon the face of the w^aters," we are 
not to think of the waving of a magician's 
wand, nor the ripple of the waters moved by the 
winds. Into this creative act goes all that we 
name personality — thought, feeling, will, all 
bending and burning toward one creative pas- 

140 



The Hero 

sion, the passion of love, of sacrifice, of giving; 
a passion that will never stay till it expresses 
itself in history, till it speaks in blood through 
the throbbing life of a Man, and of whom it 
will be most truly said, ''All things were made 
by him, and without him was not anything 
made that was made." And his coming into 
history will be explained by the fact that ''God 
so loved the world, that he gave his only begot- 
ten Son, that whosoever believeth on him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life." 
All this is but the sequence of the Infinite trav- 
ail, of the creative passion making all things 
new — yes, finally new, a new creation in Christ 
Jesus. 

Now, it is this very thought we find in these 
most remarkable chapters of Isaiah from the 
fortieth on — chapters that fairly throb with 
what has been called the "passion of God.'' 
The objective point is the captive people. The 
voices have carried the message of hope to 
them. "Behold, God will come with a strong 
hand.'' Then he comes. Comes with a strong 
hand, but a strange one — strange to the com- 
mon thought of men. You see him coming, 
you feel his approach in the rising tide of the 
chapters. 

141 



Unto Heights Heroic 

'•Jehovah as hero goes forth 
As a man of war stirs up zeal, 
Shouts the alarm and battle cr^^ 
Against his foes, proves himself hero." 

But this deliverer going forth is more than 
a human, he is a divine Hero. His redemption 
is divine, not human. It is an outpouring of 
himself, in arguments, in judgments, in awak- 
ening thoughts, in passionate pleading. In all 
the burning eloquence of God he pours life into 
their impoverished veins, thoughts into their 
stupid minds, and love into their wasted hearts. 
He pours himself out till the limits of language 
are reached and a strange silence falls. In the 
midst of the people a strange figure appears, one 
so strange that the world is amazed, kings are 
dumb, and the people aghast. What has not 
been heard, what has not been said, what can 
never be said, is here. It is the ultimate ex- 
pression of the divine passion: the silent Serv- 
ant of Jehovah in the midst of his task, in the 
travail of his soul. 

To the world — to those who have not felt 
the significance of our own divinity; who have 
not learned that it is onlv bv the travail of our 
soul, only by sacrifice, that personal force can 
reach anything like a creative function, only 

142 



The Hero 

through our Gethsemanes and Calvaries can we 
make the world flower about us — to the world, 
I say, he is a strange, bruised, wounded, and 
disfigured form. But to God he is the prosper- 
ous servant. ''He shall prosper." More liter- 
ally, ''He has the insight and ability of destiny." 

He sees man at those strange, mysterious 
depths unpierced by any human eye. He will 
seek out — trace thought by thought, feeling by 
feeling, purpose by purpose — the destiny of the 
soul. He will discover, unearth, redeem the 
soul from circumstance, fate, and sin. 

What is sin but chaos of soul? What is sin 
but stubbornness of heart? What is sin but 
discord of life ? What is sin but the wayward 
will? And He, moving upon the face of the 
wild human waters, in the sublime travail of his 
soul shall turn chaos into order, stubbornness 
into obedience, discord into music, and self- 
will into divine. 

We are brought in the next chapter face to 
face with the hero at his task. The revelation 
comes in the form of a human experience. 
Once more humanity is grappling with the 
Angel of life, an experience repeated again and 
again in every soul that wakens to the meaning 
of life — the same dazed unbelief; "Who has 

143 



Unto Heights Heroic 

believed — to whom is the arm of the Lord re- 
vealed?" the same turning away of the face: 
'There is no beauty in him;" and the same final 
awakening to the fact that all beauty and all 
divinity and all power is in that bruised and 
wounded form. 

We begin life where the race began by w^or- 
shiping the sun. We believe in the beauty of 
curves, the divinity of fists, and the heaven of 
enjoyment. Our idea of the divine power is 
force multiplied infinitely. We have not yet 
learned the weakness of mere force. A giant 
may crush a flower with his heel, but there is 
no power in his heel to nurse it back to life. 
That takes soul power. The power that laid 
the Atlantic cable was not in men, money, or 
enterprise, but in the soul of Cyrus W. Field. 
The power that crushed the rebellion was not 
in the armies and navies, but in the soul of 
Abraham Lincoln. And God is most and 
mightiest God when he comes in the forces of 
the soul — clad not in the whirlwind, earth- 
quake, or fire, but in a form so bruised and 
broken that the soul streams through every rift. 

All this we must learn; to this we must 
awaken: that the dominion, the power, and 
the glory are within, and that the noblest 

144 



The Hero 

thought of life is to let out these inner splen- 
dors. One Christmas Day I saw a group of 
children looking at their presents — pretty 
things. Ten minutes after they had left their 
toys — made things — and were in the back yard 
with broken bits of china making things; weav- 
ing earth's broken bits in the loom of the soul; 
touching outer things into life through the 
glory of the inner. And some day they will 
touch the broken pottery of life into a larger, 
diviner glory. And this passing from the outer 
to the inner glory, from the Sunshine-God to 
the Hero-God, is the great awakening of life. 

Slowly comes the awakening. Some day in 
our childhood reading we come upon the little 
hero, in the person of a boy who has passed 
from the lowest to the highest; a boy who 
wrought with his soul, who endured, who 
toiled, who suffered. And a new kind of tear 
rolls down our cheek, the first divine tear. The 
divine ideal is growing upon us. 

How different we felt when the army re- 
turned from war with faded uniform, tattered 
banners, and scarred faces from that hour when 
we cheered them going forth ! There is a divin- 
ity in the old glory. There is a beauty in the 
scars that was not in the curves. And in our 
(lo) 145 



Unto Heights Heroic 

hearts there is a new thrill, for they bring 
tidings not of a Sunshine-God but a Hero- 
God. 

We listen with rapt attention and admiration 
to Paul in the Sanhedrin, but we feel a new 
power when the veteran stands before us in 
silence bearing the marks of the Lord Jesus 
upon him. It is the glory of God breaking 
through every scar. 

This is the awaking of life from the sunshine 
that soothes to the hero that calls — from nature 
to men, from men to Christ. This is the 
thought at the heart of this fifty-third chapter 
of Isaiah. It is the medley of an awakening 
soul. It is the cry of the human pierced by the 
presence of God. They are puzzled, they are 
dazed. He is a mystery. He runs counter to 
all their thoughts of life. They despise his 
weakness; they turn their faces from his de- 
formity. By the canons of religion they take 
him for a victim of his own sin; he is ''smitten 
of God and afflicted." 

But through all this tumult of the outer — of 
thought, feeling, and prejudice — the revelation 
of the inner is bearing down upon their soul. 
A new thought of God, a new sense of beauty, 
a new vision of power, is creeping over their 

146 



The Hero 

soul. A new ideal, a new hero of life, is 
towering above them. This man is no dark 
mystery, he is the clear revelation of God; no 
deformity, but the highest and divinest beauty; 
no victim, but a hero, a master, a servant of 
God. 

If about him we see the strange, dazed, dis- 
gusted, and angry human faces; if circum- 
stances seem to overwhelm him, crush him; if 
he is silent when we listen for his voice, it is 
not because he is a victim but a master. Silent ! 
yes, because he is looking out from the travail 
of his soul, down into the heart of man, up into 
the heart of God, and away into the future, 
satisfied already with his divine mastery. 

The people hear a new voice; deep calls unto 
deep. It is the hero voice calling them to the 
heroic life, waking the divine in them. And 
they tremble upon the verge of a new life. But 
it is only a trembling at first — a contrition for 
sin that breaks forth into penitential song. 
They have seen the divine Hero, but, alas! he 
is crushed under the weight of their own un- 
divine life. "He is wounded for our transgres- 
sions, he is bruised for our iniquities.'' 

Yet this is the very point where life begins, 
as JoHn Newton once sang : 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

"I saw One hanging on a tree, 

In agony and blood, 
Who fixed his languid eyes on me. 

While at the cross I stood. 

"Never to my latest breath 

Shall I forget that look : 
He seemed to charge me with his death, 

Though not a word he spoke." 

The same conscience that finally awakes to com- 
mend the divine Hero condemns me. 

There is a time when a rift occurs in life; 
when the very ideal that has stirred the noblest 
in us looms up from another, impossible shore; 
when we awake to the startling fact that in 
life there are two worlds, not one : this world 
of sunshine and clouds below, and that world 
of moral and spiritual heroism above. This 
lower is very human, that higher is very divine. 
And we cannot shake off the conviction — nay, 
we would not shake off the conviction — that 
our true life belongs to that higher. But the 
two worlds drift on with impossible spaces 
lying between them. 

True, there is an intermingling of light and 
life between these two. And there is the ascent 
of man, the upward struggle. Science inter- 
prets the upward trend, but the trend itself, 
the life struggle upward, never came through 

148 



The Hero 

science. The deeper meaning of life is not told 
in ''the ascent of man/' but in the descent of 
God; not in evolution, but in revelation; not 
from below, but from above — for life is born of 
ideals, and ideals are always above. 

Between Job and this divine Hero there is an 
apparent similarity, yet a decided difference. 
In Job the hero climbs upward through doubt 
and darkness and suffering into the deeper mys- 
teries of life. The inevitable falls upon him, 
and he turns it to the finer issues of his soul. 

But here the Hero of God is not ascend- 
ing, but descending. He is not a victim, 
but a master. It is not the inevitable, but a 
task to which he freely puts his soul. The 
travail of his soul is not for finer issues in him- 
self, but in the souls of men. It is the dynamics 
of God entering into the life of men. And 
these men, penitent, broken, plastic before him, 
find the purpose of his life in their own life. 
''With his stripes we are healed." "The chas- 
tisements of our peace are upon him.'' They 
reach life through life. Nay, rather, life has 
come; the rift is crossed from above. The tides 
of heaven rush through them — a new world has 
entered and beats against the shores of the old. 

The very potency of God has entered our life. 
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Unto Heights Heroic 

^'He shall see his seed." His seed is in us. 
He shall find himself in us over and over again. 
We shall be repeaters — echoes of his life. For 
him to live will be men, and men and more men, 
and diviner, till far down the ages one shall 
cry, ''Beloved, it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be, but — we shall be like him." 

Through him we shall evolve the purpose of 
God in us; for ''he shall divide the spoil with 
the strong." As we go forth from our Baby- 
Ions, in the progress of the world, not at his car 
shall all the captives be led; not on his shoul- 
ders shall all the spoils be borne. He shall walk 
in the midst of an army of strong men, men who 
are conscious of such a fullness of life that they 
pour themselves out with a strange prodigality 
till the desert world blooms like a garden. One 
shall find the forces of nature playing their 
strange game about his feet, and shall lift them 
and make them take part in the larger game of 
human destiny. Another shall catch the music 
of the sea upon his sensitive soul and fling it to 
the world in poetic measure; while yet another, 
receiving into his heart the deep life of God, on 
fire with the redeeming passion of the Hero, 
shall rush earthward, crying, "This, this is the 
hour for souls." 

ISO 



THE CHRIST 
l^iterature 



*'Oft the ancient forms 
Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. 
The wine skins, now and then a little warped. 
Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in : 
Spare the old bottles !— spill not the new wine." 

— Mrs. Browning. 

"Then he remembered how that in the dream 
One told him of the marvel of that stream, 
Whose waters are a well of youth eterne. 
And night and day its crystal heart doth yearn 
To wed its youthhood with the sea's old age; 
And faring on that bridal pilgrimage. 
Its waters past the shining city are rolled. 
And all the people drink and wax not old." 

— William Watson. 



LITERATURE 

** Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets : I am 
not come to destroy, but to fulfill."— Matt, v, 17. 

The Bible realizes its ideal in history. 
Other literatures have failed in this respect. 
Plato spoke of a man that should come with the 
last word of truth. But that man never came 
to complete the philosophy of Plato. The artist 
idealized beauty into a god. But that god never 
became incarnate and visited the studio of the 
artist. Confucius bends all his theories toward 
what he calls ''the superior man." But that 
man never came to verify the theories of 
Confucius. 

But God seems to have entered into a league 
with the Hebrew Bible that sometime, some- 
where, the great ideal of that book should be 
realized in a person. Now, it has been said, 
and most truly, that ''personality is the Ulti- 
mate Reality," therefore the Bible reveals the 
Ultimate Reality; is a complete book. Other 
books are fragments. They begin with a per- 
son in local relations and pass on into words, 
powerless words. This book begins with words, 
the dreams and aspirations of the centuries, 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

and passes on into a person, who has universal 
relations, an almighty and all-loving Person, 
complete in him. '1 am come not to destroy, 
but to fulfill/' These Old Testament scriptures 
hold potentially God's great thought of life, and 
Jesus Christ came to fulfill it. 

There are different ways of treating the past. 
One is to become its slave. What has been 
must be. What is written is written. As a 
prominent Jesuit has said of his Church, ''Her 
methods may ebb and flow, her ritual change, 
her discipline undergo modifications, but her 
doctrines never." That is, the logic of one cen- 
tury will fix the boundaries of life for all cen- 
turies. This was the teaching of the scribes in 
the days of Christ. We are bound by the past 
— magnificent fetters, golden chains, wrought 
by Moses, the prophets, and the elders. 

Christ met the old scripture not as a slave, 
but as a master — the highest form of mastery. 
He did not destroy — the real master never 
does; he redeems, he fulfills. He nourished 
his young life on those old books. You can't 
nourish your life on a book unless in some de- 
gree you master it. Swallowing a book whole 
never nourishes a man's life. You must learn 
how to husk a book to get at the corn. And 

154 



Literature 

you must learn the difference in the value of the 
husk and the corn. 

In these old scriptures there is much of the 
human husk enfolding the golden kernels of 
God. Jesus husked them of the letter, the form, 
the incidental, the detail, down to the living 
spirit. This gave the scriptures in his hands a 
living, present-day value and power. He did 
not appeal to them because they were old, be- 
cause the elders had approved of them, but 
because they were a living power, a present- 
day force, something to command men that 
very hour. 

And this takes us another step in his mastery 
of the scriptures. So sure is he that he is in line 
with the ancient Spirit of God that he dares put 
himself into the old scriptures, making them 
speak again with his own living voice: ''Ye 
have heard how that it hath been said, . . . but 
I say unto you." Since then those old scrip- 
tures have throbbed with a new and deeper 
life. 

Just as some great genius, some Shakespeare, 
takes a bit of ancient history and makes it live 
again by putting himself into it — making the 
characters live, move, and have their being in 
his life — so Jesus Christ put himself into the 

155 



Unto Heights Heroic 

old scriptures till they live, move, and have 
their being in him. The scribes had been spin- 
ning them out into details, rituals, commen- 
taries, creeds. Christ entered them, making 
them live again with God's great idea of life. 
Old boundaries of interpretation were broken 
and expanded. The psalms were set to a larger 
music. The old epics were made to tell a 
divine story. And prophecy that had been 
waiting for ages in cheerless expectation felt 
itself live again with the Spirit of God. There 
are masters through whom we study the true, 
the beautiful, and the good. But there is but 
one supreme Master through whom we must 
read God's ancient story of life. 

But there is a scripture more ancient than the 
Hebrew. That is nature. Long before this 
scripture was written that other scripture was 
being studied. There were nature stories 
before there were Bible stories. And how to 
master the nature stories through the Bible 
stories was and still is the problem, the great 
problem in literature. 

There are men who instead of being slaves 
of the past, like the scribes, simply sweep it 
away, crying, ''Away with tradition." They 
think themselves prophets, but they are not; 

156 



Literature 

for a real prophet does not destroy, he fulfills. 
He strikes the flinty rocks of the past, the reser- 
voirs of God, and they burst forth in living 
waters. 

But the air just now is full of the cry, ''Away 
with the past.'' Modern literature has been 
faithfully characterized as a 'literature of re- 
volt." "Away with old forms, old creeds, and 
old teachings ; let us get out of the stuffy atmos- 
phere of tradition." Out where? Into the 
open road of nature. This is the cry. Back 
from the ancient scripture to the more ancient 
scripture. Whitman says, "I see now the secret 
of making the best men: it is to grow in the 
open air and eat and sleep with the earth." 
Then the North American Indians, the Hot- 
tentots, and the South Sea Islanders ought to 
be the best men. They live in the open air and 
eat and sleep with the earth. 

Grow best in the open air! Why that de- 
pends on what we are. If we are men with the 
prophecy of divinity within us it seems to me 
we shall grow best not under the tutelage of 
nature, but of the Divine Man. 

This thought should decide us on those fine 
spring mornings when we are debating between 
the temple of the living Christ and the temple 

157 



Unto Heights Heroic 

of nature — whether true life, rich, noble, and 
strong, lies in the direction of 

''O to be lost in the wind and the sun, 
To be one with the wind and the stream ! 

With never a care while the waters run, 
With never a thought in my dream," 

or in the direction of that other uncompromis- 
ing heroic voice, calling down from the heights 
of manhood, ''Whosoever will come after me, 
let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and 
follow me;'' whether we are not more in need 
of the Hero-God than the Nature-God. 

But nature always leads the thoughtful man 
another step — from her dreamy soothing songs 
into her heartless, resistless laws; into fatalism, 
crushing fatalism. 

Modern literature is ''sicklied o'er with the 
pale cast of fatalism," is more than half pagan. 
It has not quite risen to the lofty spirit of the 
Bible, working out the grand epic of man's free 
spirit through the "shades of the prison house" 
unto the liberty of the sons of God. 

And what we find in literature we find in 
life. The hardest thing to meet is just this 
sentiment of fatalism creeping over the spirit 
of life; referring everything to circumstances, 

158 



Literature 

to law, to environment — not daring to stand 
for our own God-given free spirit. 

When Christ came to carry out, to fulfill, 
God's thought of life he came to nature. But 
he approached nature as no man had ever done 
before. He loved her, but not as her slave, as 
her master. He must have loved nature, else he 
never would have seen so much in her. Her 
birds and brooks, her green hills and mysteri- 
ous mountains, were the sweet, sympathetic 
companions of his life. But they never wooed 
him to their dreamy, listless songs, as they have 
so many other teachers in that Eastern land. 
They never bound him in the shackles of their 
fatalistic laws. No fatalism ever blighted his 
words. His was the high and holy language of 
the free and buoyant spirit. 

Other men have sung nature's songs and told 
nature's stories. But Jesus Christ came with 
the master spirit and wooed nature to his own 
story of life. He did not sing her songs, she 
sang his. He did not tell her stories, she told 
his. He did not take up the thought of the 
lily's life, but he made the lily take up the 
thought of his life. He did not undertake to 
tell the story of the sparrow's life, but he wove 
the sparrow into his own great story of life. 

159 



Unto Heights Heroic 

He did not lead us back and down into the 
long, mysterious life-and-death story of the 
kernel of wheat, but he wove it into his own 
great life-and-death story. And ever since it 
has been repeating the story of a life beyond the 
grave. 

His story of life is larger and diviner than 
nature's story. Hers is mortal, his immortal. 
Hers is of bondage, his of freedom. Her story 
runs backward, his runs forward. Hers is of 
the earth, earthy, his is of the sons and daugh- 
ters of God. 

But there is another scripture deeper and 
older than nature. It is our life, our inmost 
being. It is deeper and older because the linea- 
ments of God are in it — the divine possibility; 
that prophecy in men written before the founda- 
tions of the world, that Jesus Christ came not to 
destroy, but to fulfill; that prophecy buried 
away in the heart of the publican and sinner, 
a prophecy that Jesus alone could see, could 
read, could fulfill, and so hovered about the 
soul : such a prophecy in us all to be fulfilled, 
if ever, through Jesus Christ. 

One thing stands in the way of that fulfill- 
ment — not law, not circumstance, but sin. 
Some writers tell us sin is only a morbid condi- 

i6o 



Literature 

tion of the conscience induced by tradition ; and 
some that it is only an imperfection of our 
nature that we shall in time outgrow. But the 
deep heart of man has never accepted these defi- 
nitions of sin. Our deepest intuitions pass be- 
yond tradition and nature, and lodge the diffi- 
culty in the will, in the central life. 

But how to manage the will of man is the 
whole problem of life. And so sin becomes the 
final objective point of all human effort. It 
keeps the world busy. If sin could be elim- 
inated from the world the most of us would be 
out of work. 

This problem of sin, this conflict with sin, 
was the principal business of the Hebrew na- 
tion. All that great structure of sacrifices and 
ceremonies, of statutes and literatures, of obli- 
gations and oaths, built up through the cen- 
turies into a mighty, complex, and elaborate 
piece of machinery, was all designed to meet the 
fact of sin. 

Now, that whole great structure stood for 
life to the Jew. It said. Do this and live. And 
Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfill. 

But imagine the shock to the Hebrew world 
when this man dares to reduce this whole struc- 
ture, hoary with years, to a simple story of 
(II) i6i 



Unto Heights Heroic 

family life — of a son who goes astray, who 
comes to himself, who returns home and casts 
himself into the forgiving arms of a father. 

If simplicity be the highest mark of mastery 
— ^and is it not ? — then Jesus Christ must be the 
Master in literature. He probes the heart of 
all scriptures and reduces them to a simple story 
plucked from the family life of man. 

And is this indeed the real story of life? So 
Jesus Christ tells us; and he puts himself into 
the story, and that made it real. He did not 
explain it, but he lived it. His atonement was 
a life. He lived it. And when he had lived 
it out to the last red drop of blood, lived it out 
to the right-hand glory of God, then by faith 
was the story transferred in terms of a new life 
to the soul of man. Since then the world's 
best literature has been struggling to write this 
story the Master lived, this story of life that 
lies deeper than tradition or nature, deeper than 
environment or heredity — the epic of man's 
free spirit, the story of sin, forgiveness, and 
sonship. 

162 



THE CHRIST 
History 



*Tor this is Love's nobility — 
Not to scatter bread and gold, 
Goods and raiment bought and sold: 
But to hold fast his simple sense, 
And speak the speech of innocence, 
And with hand, and bod}-, and blood, 
To make his bosom counsel good. 
For he that feedeth men serveth few; 
He serves all who dares be true." 

— Emerson. 

"And I saw, and behold a white horse : and he that 
sat on him had a bow ; and a crow^n was given unto him : 
and he went forth conquering, and to conquer." — John. 



HISTORY 

*' But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. . . . 
Jesus said unto him. It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord 
thy God. . . . Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan : for it 
is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou 
serve." — Matt, iv, 4, 7, 10. 

There are at least two sides to the tempta- 
tion of Jesus. First, there was the temptation 
itself, the testing and proving that he was the 
Son of God. Then there were the utterances 
wrung from him in the hour of his trial, the 
enunciation of those principles through which 
he achieved his mission. They are quotations 
from an old scripture, words touched into a 
new and larger meaning by the lips of Jesus. 
*'Man shall not live by bread alone," and ''thou 
shalt not tempt God," but ''thou shalt serve 
him." There is a distinct development of 
thought here, leading us into the full meaning 
of the life of Christ as the Master of the world's 
history. 

Jesus did not make bread, because he came 
to make men, and men are not made of bread. 
This thought that man does not live by bread 
alone grew out of an experience of God's peo- 
ple. God had been making some men, and he 

165 



Unto Heights Heroic 

hadn't used much bread in the process. He 
had made them not in gardens, but in the 
desert; not among the vineyards, but under the 
shadow of somber mountains. They were led 
not by the wheat fields of the future, but by a 
fire at night and a cloud by day. He had made 
them of words, knowledge, visions, command- 
ments, and discipline, sifting them in through 
the soul as the sun sifts through the chinks of 
a cavern till it is all glorious within. 

This is the most ancient lesson of God, that 
man does not live by bread, but by words — the 
lesson Abraham had to learn. One day the 
question of bread arose — he must have bread. 
Down to Egypt he goes, coins his soul in the 
mint of iniquity, and buys bread. But he learns 
the lesson and returns again to his hill country, 
there to nourish his higher nature, as God 
whispers through the oak, speaks in the sacri- 
fice, and looks down through the steady, strong 
stars. Another day, when he and Lot stood 
out to divide the land, it was a bread question 
again. Lot took the bread, the fertile plains; 
and this time Abraham was content with the 
rocks, the stars, and God. 

This is the age-long lesson of God. We start 
with bread, then we must have clothes, and 

i66 



History 

then houses ; but to-morrow we must have finer 
bread, better clothes, pockets in them, and 
something to put in the pockets. Every day- 
creates new hungers, and the old is lost in the 
appeal of the new. 

There is the hunger of the mind for truth, 
ascending to all heights and descending to all 
depths. Turning back upon history, digging 
into self — all questions of bread overrun in this 
great mind hunger, freezing at the poles, burn- 
ing at the equator, suffering, toiling, dying for 
the truth. 

There is another hunger following upon this, 
the hunger of the conscience for new duties; 
for no sooner does a new truth possess a man 
than a new world beckons to him. Paul with 
the old Pharisaic truth, narrow and keen, cuts 
a swath of destruction in the name of duty, 
haling men and women to prison. But when 
the new truth came, behold, a new duty. He is 
just as eager now to throw open the prison 
doors of life, crying, 'The love of Christ con- 
straineth me." 

And what is this lesson but this : the infinite 
capacity for life in man, the capacity for God; 
*'all the words'' that proceed out of the mouth 
of God. And it was this infinite capacity Jesus 

167 



Unto Heights Heroic 

came to recognize in man. This he insisted 
upon; this thought shaped his ministry — the 
infinite capacity of life. Every gospel door 
opened out. One day at Nazareth he took up 
the scripture of Isaiah : ''Gospel for the poor, 
deliverance for captives, sight for the blind, 
liberty for the bruised." Every gateway swing- 
ing outward and life pouring forth in an ever- 
swelling stream. 

And one day around this very question of 
bread he works out again the old thought that 
man does not live by bread. He had just per- 
formed the miracle of the loaves. Then from 
the bread he leads up to words, great living 
words, and from words to himself, till the 
crowd melted away and only a few of his fol- 
lowers were left; then turning to them with 
''And will ye also go?'' while Peter — Peter 
always bigger inside than out, always with 
more ideas than he knew what to do with, with 
more life than he could manage — Peter rose to 
the occasion, crying, ^'To whom shall we go? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life." 

Standing out, then, with this infinite capacity 
for life, half real, half ideal, the question fol- 
lows. What shall we do with it? This life, 
this infinite capacity for life, what direction 

i68 



History 

shall it take? This brings us naturally to the 
second scripture, and the first thought is to ex- 
ploit this life, this capacity, for ourself. Climb 
to the pinnacle and cast thyself down; startle 
the world; tempt God, test him, develop him, 
according to thy will. 

But this is to reverse the order of life. 
'Thou shalt not tempt God.'' God is not here 
to be tempted; we are. God is not here to be 
tested; we are. God is not here to be developed, 
but we are. We need to be tested, tried, devel- 
oped, drawn up into God's will, for that is the 
moralization of life. 

Let no man think the world a machine to be 
run by him. The world is a school. God is the 
master, and we are in training for moral ends. 
It is a graded school, and we pass from grade 
to grade, through temptation, trials, develop- 
ment. Every day we break from the little cir- 
cles into the larger; pass more and more into 
the orbit of God's will, more and more into the 
moral quality. 

It is not a self-willed dash from the pinnacle. 
Manhood is not in such an act. Strength and 
mastery are not there. It is rather a climbing 
to the pinnacle, a measuring up and up, till we 
reach the top; then not to hurl ourselves down, 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

but to stand, to balance ourself there, accord- 
ing to the moral structure of the universe. 
This is mastery, this strength, this service. 

'Tor he that feedeth men serveth few ; 
He serves all who dares be true." 

Our own Lincoln in the last century achieved 
this. When they rushed upon him demanding 
his policy, the miracle by which he should save 
the nation, he remained calm, and for policies 
gave principles. When they were hurling 
themselves from their pinnacles in frantic poli- 
cies of the hour he was searching deeper for the 
will of God. Groping his way toward the 
moral trend, he got his feet upon the granite, 
and there stood when his friends fell like nine- 
pins about him. But it was no blind fatalism; 
rather, he had reached the pinnacle of an 
ethicised soul. He was alive, alert, aquiver 
with the sensitiveness of God. And when the 
morning rays of hope at last broke it was the 
mountain peak of his soul that was first bathed 
in sunlight. 

The dash from the pinnacle is self-willed. It 
may project itself in theories, policies, schemes 
— commercial, social, political, or otherwise. 
These may be enforced by the stubborn, strenu- 
ous will, the set teeth, the fixed eye, the clinched 

170 



History 

fist, but the stars fight against us in their course. 
The ministry of angels does not He along this 
way. For what is the ministry of angels but 
the ministry of the higher nature. The 
thoughts and feelings that weave themselves 
into the soul that is under the training of God. 
The manna that nourishes the will that is under 
the tutelage of the Almighty. The larger views 
ever flowing in from above, lifting life through 
the downward currents as a ship is borne up- 
ward through the locks by the constant inflow- 
ing water, till we reach at last the mountain 
heights of a moral life, illumined of God, and 
look out upon the world with the eyes of God. 

And this is the scene of the third temptation. 
We are already in the presence of the third 
scripture, 'Thou shalt worship God, and him 
only shalt thou serve.'' 

There is but one divine service. The tempter 
proposed that Jesus buy the world, own it. 
But, quite aside from the morale of the pur- 
chase, owning the world is not serving God. 
Owning the Philippines is not serving God. 
Owning a dollar is not serving God. There is 
but one divine service. Redeeming things, 
bringing back the lost values, the divine worth 
of things — this is both worship and service. 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

Gold is lost in the mountains till it is re- 
deemed, and then it must be redeemed again 
into the ser\'ice of God and man; for when we 
get it we are not sure what to do with it. To- 
day we make of it the golden calf; to-morrow 
we fresco the sky, shutting out the sun; the 
next day we adorn ourselves, and, behold, we 
are in fetters. By and by we shall get the New 
Jerusalem idea, that gold is not for gods, nor 
sky. nor fetters, but for streets, for pavements 
for the sons of God to walk home on. 

Art is lost in the discords of the world until 
the redeemers come — the poets, painters, and 
musicians. And it. too, must be redeemed 
again ere it come into the ser^'ice of God and 
man. For to-day her ministry is mixed, per- 
verse, per^'erted, and perA'erting. It is playing 
to the pit of sense instead of the heights of the 
soul. Yet we believe it is slowly working its 
way into more spiritual hands, hands of the 
immortal harpers that serve God day and night; 
into that sen'ice which Tolstoi claims is the 
real mission of art — the fatherhood of God and 
the brotherhood of man. 

And science, too. is lost in the labyrinth of 
the universe and must be redeemed — twice re- 
deemed : first from nature, and then from doubt 

172 



History 

to faith, from matter to spirit, from the making 
of bread to the making of man. 

But there is a redemption deeper and more 
vital, a redemption about which all these play 
but a secondary part — the redemption of the 
sons of God from the depths of our humanity. 
This is the redemption of Jesus; the heart of 
all redemption. 

There is an ancient scripture to the effect 
that a fact may be established by two witnesses, 
and there are two witnesses to the fact that we 
are the sons of Adam. One is within, the other 
without. Our environment forever bears wit- 
ness with our inherited weakness that we are 
children of the first Adam. But Jesus came to 
establish another fact, an overwhelming fact, 
mighty and victorious — that we are the sons of 
God, sons of the spirit, sons of power, sons of 
liberty. And this has been established by two 
witnesses, one within and one above. ^The 
Spirit of God beareth witness with our spirit 
that we are the sons of God." This is at 
once the foundation and goal of the world's 
progress. 

"What if the o'erturned altar 
Lays bare the ancient lie? 
What if the dreams and legends 
Of the world's childhood die? 

^3 



Unto Heights Heroic 

''Have ye not his witness 

Within yourselves always, 
His hand that on the keys of life 

For bliss or bale he lays?" 

The divine current of history, then, accord- 
ing to the scripture of the temptation and under 
the mastery of Christ, flows ever toward the 
development of man's infinite capacity — flows 
not wantonly and willfully, but is seized and 
bent, trained and disciplined, unto the will of 
God and the moralization of the world. 

Nor is this the full significance of the world's 
progress. The movement is more than moral. 
It is spiritual. It is redemptive. It is a series 
of new births, of new worlds redeemed from 
the old. 

The victory of Christ in the wilderness is the 
age-long victory of Christ in his world. 

"The world's old; 
But the old world waits the time to be renewed : 
Toward which, new hearts in individual growth 
Must quicken, and increase to multitude 
In new dynasties of the race of men — 
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously 
New churches, new economies, new laws 
Admitting freedom, new societies 
Excluding falsehood. He shall make all new." 

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THE CHRIST 
Life 



"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once; 
And He that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy." — Shakespeare. 

"And in the lowest beasts are slaying men, 
And in the second men are slaying beasts, 
And on the third are warriors, perfect men, 
And on the fourth are men with growing wings, 
And over all one Statue." — Tennyson. 



LIFE 

** For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
from the law of sin and death." — Rom. viii, 2. 

Every philosophy discusses the freedom of 
man. The Bible transfers the question from 
discussion to life. It says if a man is not free 
he ought to be; for the whole divine purpose, 
process, and progress of the world is for the 
emancipation of man. 'Tor the earnest ex- 
pectation of the creature waiteth for the mani- 
festation of the sons of God. For the crea- 
ture was made subject to vanity, not willingly, 
but by reason of him who hath subjected the 
same in hope, because the creature itself also 
shall be delivered from the bondage of cor- 
ruption into the glorious liberty of the children 
of God." 

Freedom, then, is not a mere thought, but an 
experience; and it is this experience, not in the 
world at large, but in the individual soul, that 
Paul covers by the words, 'Tor the law of the 
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
from the law of sin and death.'' It is an ex- 
perience that begins with a struggle. 

The word ''struggle'' has reached scientific 
(12) 177 



Unto Heights Heroic 

eminence in the world's history. It is conceded 
that the earth is one great battlefield; that our 
life has been largely chiseled and shaped in the 
fierce conflict of human existence. 

Even the most superficial life has its strug- 
gles. The tramp, so lax and loose and care- 
free, has his struggles, faint and feeble though 
they may be. The devotee of society, whose 
only anxiety is to be recognized, finds even this 
a struggle, an exposure to the slings and arrows 
of pique and pride and poverty. 

Now, in all this struggle of life there is a 
certain divine tendency. The struggle is car- 
ried in from the surface toward the center; 
from the battlefield to the council chamber; 
from the council chamber to the soul of one 
man. 

Jacob begins his battle with Esau, carries it 
over to Laban, and finally discovers that the 
only battle worthy of a man is the battle with 
himself. Paul began with an external foe, the 
Christian Church, but found the conflict thrown 
back upon the battlefield of his own soul — in 
among the hidden but mighty forces of life's 
armies that had been gathering through cen- 
turies of ancestral development. Habits and 
prejudices, tempers and passions, ideas and 

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Life 

ideals, ambitions and aspirations, flesh and 
spirit, were waging an unending warfare 
across the field of life. 

This inner struggle seems at first, like the 
great world struggle, to be a strange, wild med- 
ley of discordant forces. But Paul finally re- 
duces them to the law of God and the law of 
sin; the law of life and the law of death. 

Our main interest, however, centers in the 
battle itself. We ask. How goes the battle? 
and Paul reports it against him. The members 
are warring against the head. Rebellious 
standards are lifted here and there, the integrity 
of life is assailed, the empire of the soul is in a 
state of anarchy. And all this means that the 
battle is being carried to the death; that this is 
the disintegration, demoralization, degenera- 
tion of the soul; that this is hell; that life is 
being lost, dripping away as a piece of ice melts 
in the sun; returning to dust as a stone pul- 
verized in the elements ; decomposing and dying 
like a flower plucked from the vital stem. The 
stars are fighting against him in their course. 
Life's wholeness he cannot achieve. He de- 
clares, 'To will is present with me; but how to 
perform that which is good I find not." As 
though a chemist with all the elements at hand 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

were trying to make an acorn. Mix the parts 
as he will the acorn eludes him. The spiritual 
band of life he -cannot find. 

Now Paul could have made a Pharisee, for 
he had the prescription; or a Sadducee, for he 
knew the formula. But this new life lies deeper 
than all prescriptions and all formulas, or even 
any heroic struggle of the soul of man, and he 
breaks down with the cry, ^'O wretched man 
that I am !" — breaking forth, however, the next 
moment into the exultant cry, '1 thank God 
through Jesus Christ." 

What lies in between this strange despair 
and wonderful elation, this death and life ? To 
answer this question is to find the open secret 
of life. 

In the making of life, or anything that has 
life, there are always two factors: first, the 
analysis of the material, the taking to pieces, 
and then the constructive genius. This is true 
whether it be applied to a church, a prayer 
meeting, a book, a picture, or a human life. 

God does not convert a soul — make a new 
life — simply by law; for law analyzes, law 
takes us down by showing us up. But after 
the law has reduced us to nothing, then comes 
in the constructive genius of God and makes 

i8o 



Life 

us into something. After the death of the old 
he gives us the Hfe of the new. 

What, then, is this constructive genius of 
God, this giving Hfe to things? The answer 
is more simple than we dream; for to make a 
thing live we have only to give it life; and if we 
make it live we must give it our life. Men have 
lives to give in different directions : this one 
to colors till they speak; that one to marble till 
it throbs; and this again to thought and it 
breaks into singing. If you want a church to 
live, to live again, you only need to give it life. 
Put in the life, and, behold, it is alive. This is 
the simple fact and the great truth. It is the 
truth of all truth. When God would make a 
world live, would give it life, he simply gave it 
his life. 

This is the supreme fact about God, that he 
is a spontaneous God; and all the world about 
us of life and power is throbbing with his spon- 
taneity. He is a generous God filling the world 
with the wealth of his being; a giving God who 
spares not himself in the giving. And this 
spontaneous, generous, giving God is the su- 
preme fact in life. When, in Jesus Christ, he 
walked through the haunts of our humanity it 
was only to give, and give, and give again. 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

Can we then in such a presence live a narrow, 
mean, and sordid Hfe? Is there not a certain 
divine compulsion upon us — a new command- 
ment coming not from without but breaking 
forth from our own heart? This something 
we have discovered in God : is it not the noblest 
and best we ever recognized in men ? — this free, 
frank, unstudied, spontaneous generosity of 
God ? How does it affect us when we find it in 
men? If your child obeys, you say that is 
right, it is what he ought to do. But if of his 
own free will he works out some generous, self- 
denying, self-sacrificing deed of kindness, it 
goes to your heart and you catch him in your 
arms. Paul said, ''Scarcely for a righteous man 
will one die : yet peradventure for a good man 
some would even dare to die." The righteous 
man whose life runs like a clock is of great 
service to the community, but no one is going 
to die for him. But the good man, the gener- 
ous, self-denying, self-sacrificing, unstudied, 
spontaneous soul, he will find men to die for 
him. In his presence souls will leap into heroic 
grandeur. He is the leader. And what the 
studied, exacting law could not do God sent his 
Son — freely, spontaneously, self-denying, self- 
sacrificing — down through all the mystery of 

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Life 

that ministry, down into life, through fate and 
sorrow, sin and death, till he reached this man 
Paul in the hell of his despair. And the very 
coming awakened something in the man, some 
slumbering divinity of the soul, some redeem- 
ing grace of being, some remnant of sponta- 
neous life, something that had never been 
reached before, something that could have been 
reached in no other way. And the divinity 
answers back to the divine, grace to grace, life 
to life, and his soul breaks heavenward in the 
cry, ''I thank God through Jesus Christ.'' 

And this man's life, that had been tortuously 
studied, exacting, and specific in its purpose, 
suddenly becomes spontaneous, divinely aban- 
doned, swinging out from a new center with a 
new and an ennobling power. We find him 
one moment with a pocket full of documents, 
charts, plans, and specifications of what he 
shall do and how he shall do it. The next 
moment the light flashes upon him, the Christ 
is before him, and soul rushes forward with 
the cry, ''Lord, what wilt thou have me to 
do?" He asks for no specifications, charts, or 
plans. He is ready to take sealed orders from 
this Christ, to ''go where he wants him to go, 
and do what he wants him to do." He has 

183 



Unto Heights Heroic 

found the real hero of the soul, and that is 
enough. He has found the centrality of life. 
For life is central; indeed, it is just this cen- 
trality that makes life life at all. All the strug- 
gle, dismemberment, and oncreeping death and 
yawning hell was just the losing of the soul's 
centrality, her unity, her integrity. 

The plant is a living thing, not because so 
many elements enter into it, but because at the || 

heart stands some central force commanding 
and swinging the elements with the rhythm of 
the universe. Nor is life life because so many 
things enter into it, rich, powerful, and choice, 
but because there is a central power command- 
ing the things as they come, shaping them there 
according to its rhythmic genius, giving to 
them of its charm, its power, its glory till every 
element swings with a free hand from the cen- 
ter; till duty becomes love, and sorrow glory, 
and death life, and life Christ, and Christ God. 
The value of things depends upon the divine 
centrality. 

Then life becomes still more deeply cen- 
tral. Christ came into the world for the 
Father. He came in the Father's name; came 
to do the Father's business; came to make 
everything spell one word. Fatherhood. What 

184 



Life 

men had called a lily he made spell fatherhood. 
What men had called a sparrow he made spell 
fatherhood. What men had called ''fisherman's 
luck'' he made spell fatherhood. He aimed to 
bring all the discordant forces of earth under 
the charm of that word; to bring all into one 
family; to restore the spiritual bond of the 
world. 

And what he does in the world he also does 
in the soul, entering it in the name of the 
Father. He marshals its discordant tempers 
and traits, inherited and acquired, into one 
family, making the lion and the lamb lie down 
together in the soul. He does not convert lion 
into lamb, nor lamb into lion, but brings all 
under one higher, restraining power by adding 
the centripetal force that gives liberty. 

But Christ comes into the soul not only in the 
Father's name, but with the Father's touch. It 
is the old creative touch of God, the springtime 
spirit that makes old things live again ; that re- 
deems that wonderful dream of life through 
which the old life began the strange struggle 
for the new. 

In some dark corner of the cellar a bulb 
awaits the spring planting. The gardener has 
forgotten it. But the bulb by instinct feels that 

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Unto Heights Heroic 

the spring sun is outside and it is making a 
faint, sickly struggle for life. It is just a 
yearning, pale and dreamlike, till suddenly the 
gardener bethinks himself and hastens to bring 
the bulb and plant it in the earth. Then the 
sun begins to give its great generous self to the 
bulb. It gives, and gives, and gives, till the 
bulb itself begins to give — gives back color, 
leaf, bud, and blossom. 

So the spirit of life in Christ Jesus streams in 
upon the soul till the whole being is quickened 
into life and begins to give, and give, and give. 
And what was only a strange, wild struggle, 
a fruitless dream of life, has become a divine 
reality, the glorious liberty of living. 

*Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 

'Life is but an empty dream!* 
For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
And things are not what they seem. 

''Life is real ! Life is earnest ! 

And the grave is not its goal ; 
Dust thou art, to dust returnest. 

Was not spoken of the soul." 
i86 



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